It is undeniable that the content published on Twitter’s platform shapes global culture, politics, and popular discourse. Twitter claims to have more than 200 million active daily users.
But when Jack Dorsey was a student at New York University in 2006, Twitter was just a crude idea. At the time, Dorsey pitched his coworkers the idea of developing an SMS service that would enable users to publicly communicate with the entire community rather than privately with a single person as they would be able to do with traditional messaging. Oedo was a podcasting startup, and Dorsey was working there.
The Odeo team found the concept to be appealing, and Dorsey and Noah Glass expanded on it. After a year, Evan Williams, the founder of Odeo, informed investors that the company was switching its emphasis from podcasting to Twitter. In an effort to protect investors from a loss, he offered to buy back Odeo’s stock.
Investors concurred, though some have since questioned whether Williams knew more about Twitter’s potential than he admitted. The team behind Twitter initially received little attention, but after attending the 2007 South by Southwest Interactive conference and receiving widespread praise, the platform’s usage suddenly tripled, and Twitter became a dominant force in the burgeoning social media landscape.
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The growing social community attracted users who wanted to connect and share messages with it, as well as businesses who now had a simple way to engage with their clients and market their goods. Twitter proved to have broad appeal.
Additionally, it turned out to have a special value for public figures, politicians, and celebrities who were attempting to connect with their audience and establish their relevance.
For instance, in the 2008 U.S. presidential election, Barack Obama amassed more supporters than 20 times that of John McCain. This demonstrated the value of a Twitter following and established the precedent for all future political use of the site.
Journalists then did the same.
Twitter made it possible to share breaking news immediately, which sped up the dissemination of information.
When Twitter celebrated its sixth birthday in 2012, it reported having 140 million users and sending out 340 million tweets daily. By that time, it had made a name for itself as a prominent platform for the dissemination of a wide range of information, from daily musings to breaking news.
In one of the most anticipated initial public offerings since Facebook’s one year earlier, Twitter went public in November 2013. The company’s market value was $32 billion at the conclusion of its first trading day.
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After being forced to resign as CEO in 2008, Dorsey took up the position again in 2015. He oversaw the creation of a number of new features for the app aimed at boosting user interaction, such as Moments, which allowed users to create collections of tweets. In 2017, Explore, which gathered topics that were currently trending, took its place.
Shortly after, in its fourth fiscal quarter of 2017, Twitter finally made its first profit. The company kept expanding both in terms of users and cultural acclaim over the ensuing few years. Dorsey resigned from his position as CEO in November 2021, and Chief Technology Officer Parag Agrawal took over in his place. Elon Musk, a multibillionaire businessman, later decided to purchase Twitter for $44 billion.
But since then, Musk has attempted to back out of that agreement, claiming that Twitter violated a number of terms of the original contract, particularly his demand that the company divulge data regarding the number of phony and spam accounts present on the social media platform. Twitter has responded by disputing these assertions and suing Musk in an effort to compel the acquisition.
This October, Twitter and Musk will square off in court. The ongoing legal dispute hasn’t helped advertisers, who historically have been the main source of Twitter’s income but have cut back on spending due to recent economic uncertainty. Last month, the company reported depressing earnings as a result of declining revenue, which led to a net loss.
Then, just earlier this week, Peiter Zatko, the former head of Twitter security, filed an explosive 200-page whistleblower disclosure with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Department of Justice, detailing how Twitter executives had misled both the board of directors and federal regulators about the company’s severe security flaws against hackers and its meager efforts to combat spam.
Congress received a redacted copy, which was later divulged to The Washington Post and CNN.
In addition to deceiving important stakeholders, Zatko contends that the company’s actions have endangered American national security.
He asserted that thousands of Twitter staff members had access to corporate software and data, which they used and interacted with to work on the company’s live product, highlighting a stark contrast to the practices of businesses like Meta and Google, which mandate the use of dummy data. In the end, he claimed that it was this wide-ranging access to user data that enabled the hacking of prominent Twitter accounts, including those of Musk and the former presidents Obama and Donald Trump.
In addition, Zatko claimed that Twitter prioritized user growth at the expense of eliminating spam and a variety of other security-related flaws.
According to Twitter spokesperson Rebecca Hahn, who spoke to the Washington Post about the claims, “Security and privacy have long been top companywide priorities at Twitter,” the claims are untrue and opportunistic. She also stated that Twitter had fired Zatko after 15 months “for poor performance and leadership.”
It remains to be seen what will transpire in light of Zatko’s allegations and how they may affect Twitter as well as Musk’s legal defense against Twitter.
For the time being, Twitter faces the enormous challenge of regaining trust from both the courts and its millions of daily users that the platform is secure, safe, and truthful in its dealings.
In the end, Zatko made the case that he filed his whistleblower complaint in the hopes of bringing about new scrutiny and accountability that would encourage the company to improve its procedures.
