Portal:Internet/Selected article/31
X, commonly referred to by its former name Twitter, is a social media website based in the United States. With over 500 million users, it is one of the world's largest social networks and the fifth-most visited website in the world. Users can share text messages, images, and videos through posts (originally called "tweets"). X also includes direct messaging, video and audio calling, bookmarks, lists and communities, and Spaces, a social audio feature. Users can vote on context added by approved users using the Community Notes feature.
The service is owned by the American company X Corp., the successor of Twitter, Inc. Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams, and was launched in July of that year. Twitter grew quickly; by 2012 more than 100 million users produced 340 million tweets per day. Twitter, Inc., was based in San Francisco, California, and had more than 25 offices around the world. A signature characteristic of the service is that posts are required to be brief (originally 140 characters, later expanded to 280 in 2017). The majority of tweets are produced by a minority of users. In 2020, it was estimated that approximately 48 million accounts (15 percent of all accounts) were not genuine people. (Full article...)