Twitter turns 25: the platform that changed journalism and then reinvented itself
From Jack Dorsey’s first tweet to the platform’s transition to X under Elon Musk. Over a quarter of a century, the platform has invented a new language, chronicled revolutions, transformed politics and sparked debate on the power of algorithms and artificial intelligence.
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That first tweet was never meant to go down in history. On 21 March 2006, Jack Dorsey wrote: ‘Just setting up my twttr’. A routine message, almost a technical check. And yet, from those four words, one of the most influential experiments in the history of the Internet was born.
On 15 July 2026, twenty-five years after the launch of the project that would later become Twitter – and is now known as X – it is worth asking not only how the platform has changed, but how it has changed us.
Twitter was probably the most important social network relative to its size. It never had the user numbers of Facebook, Instagram or TikTok, but it had something the others had been chasing for years: the ability to become the place where news took shape in real time. It was the social media platform of choice for journalists, politicians, scientists, businesses, emergencies and revolutions. A gigantic seismograph capable of recording events across the globe almost the moment they happened.
Its origins tell a story typical of Silicon Valley. Twitter rose from the ashes of Odeo, a start-up that had bet on podcasts at the wrong time. When Apple integrated podcasts into iTunes, the project seemed doomed to disappear. But in the tech world, the best ideas often spring from failure. Noah Glass recognised the potential of a short-message system, Jack Dorsey envisaged how it would work, and Biz Stone and Evan Williams helped turn it into a product. The idea was simple: to post status updates in 140 characters, the limit imposed by text messages. What seemed like a technical constraint instead became a language in its own right.
The real innovation, however, came from the users
The hashtag was not invented by Twitter but by Chris Messina in 2007. That simple hash symbol transformed millions of scattered messages into organised conversations. Shortly afterwards came the retweet, mentions with the @ symbol and threads. None of these features were part of the original plan. It was the users who taught the platform how to work. Twitter did something that seems almost impossible today: it let its users define their own language.
Within a few years, it had become a global information infrastructure. It covered the San Francisco earthquake, the 2009 protests in Iran, the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, the Black Lives Matter movement and the #MeToo movement. During health crises, wars and natural disasters, it was often the first place where images, eyewitness accounts and data emerged. Journalism learnt to coexist with a source that produced news in real time but required constant verification. Speed became both an advantage and, at the same time, a problem.
