They Changed How Twitter Looks Again
Twitter turns 15: A look back at how the platform changed our lives
The biggest moments on the platform over the past decade and a half.
Fifteen years agone, a New York University dropout shared a ambiguous message online: "simply setting up my twttr."
Those five words from Jack Dorsey -- the first tweet ever -- are now existence auctioned off, with offers as high equally $ii.5 1000000.
Very few could have predicted when it launched in 2006, merely Twitter would go along to change the media landscape, political discourse and society in permanent and profound ways.
By amplifying previously marginalized voices, Twitter aided in political movements and societal reckonings hashtag by hashtag -- from #MeToo to #BlackLivesMatter. It also contributed to the instantaneity of information -- both from traditional news media and citizen journalists, giving anyone, anywhere, an immediate window into history as it unfolded.
But the democratization of the net that Twitter relied on meant that others could exploit it to spread letters of hate and disinformation, which go along to have hold despite efforts from the platform.
"One of the promises of Twitter was that it would allow people connect and people without resources would exist able to organize politically," Jonathan Nagler, a professor of politics at New York University and co-director of the NYU Social Media and Political Participation Lab, told ABC News. "And that applies both left and right, and so you get Arab Spring and y'all get Charlottesville -- and and then there's the elephant in the room of Donald Trump."
Twitter, as well equally other social media platforms, has taken steps in recent years to crack downwardly on misinformation and disinformation, but critics say information technology's not plenty. Others say that labeling misleading tweets and banning politicians like Trump has impeded free spoken language, creating a new set of issues as users grapple with the key question of whom to believe.
Hither is a look back at some of the biggest moments in Twitter'south 15-yr history and how the platform changed the world.
2009: Miracle on the Hudson
The storied landing of Usa Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River by airplane pilot Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger is seen every bit a pivotal turning point for the burgeoning social media platform.
On Jan. 15, 2009, Janis Krums was taking a ferry to New Jersey when he snapped a photo of the plane in the water and shared information technology with his 170 Twitter followers. Many say this altered the media landscape for good as Twitter emerged as a new outlet for the nigh-instantaneous sharing of breaking news.
"I snapped the photo through a window right before we pulled upwardly to one of the wings of the plane," Krums told ABC News via email. "I didn't take any other photos after that."
Krums said he and so gave his telephone to one of the passengers that was rescued and when he got his telephone back, "I started to get calls from dissimilar news shows virtually the event and how I had used Twitter to notify the world."
"I had no idea about how quickly it went viral until later that night," he added.
"Twitter has get the news source, information technology's where people get to find breaking news," Krums said. "That wasn't the case then, I wasn't the only ane on the ferry with a smartphone. But I was the but 1 who used Twitter to mail service the photograph."
"Today anybody would be doing this, as we've seen with every major event since," he added.
Twitter's co-founder and chief executive, Dorsey, said in a 2013 interview with CNBC that the Miracle on the Hudson "changed everything" for Twitter.
"Suddenly the world turned its attending considering we were the source of news -- and information technology wasn't us, it was this person in the boat using the service, which is even more amazing," Dorsey told the outlet.
Krums said for him, his life is now "forever linked to Twitter and the Miracle on the Hudson."
2010: The Arab Spring
Starting in late 2010, a series of anti-government and pro-republic protests erupted beyond the Middle E and North Africa in a move that eventually became known as the Arab Jump. These largely leaderless protests calling for sweeping reforms in the human rights arena -- and in some cases revolution -- appeared in Bahrain, Tunisia, Arab republic of egypt, Great socialist people's libyan arab jamahiriya, Syria and Yemen.
In an apparent first, the rest of the earth watched these uprisings occur in real time online.
"Without Twitter and Facebook it'south very hard for me to see the Arab Spring unfolding," Mohammed Soliman, a scholar at the Middle Due east Institute think tank in Washington, D.C., told ABC News. "I would say it's a digital revolution."
At a time when in that location was niggling to no freedom of the press in the region, Soliman said social media inverse everything for masses of people, giving them a new place to share ideas and information that wasn't yet under the authority of the regime.
Like many others at the time, Soliman said, "I call up about Twitter in the Arab Bound as public space, as a public square."
Soliman said that Facebook had some limitations because of the privacy settings of certain groups and pages, so Twitter was used as the main platform to dilate messages from the region to the rest of the world.
In addition to publicizing what was happening to the rest of the world, Soliman said Twitter was instrumental in organizing protests and giving locals confidence by seeing that "at that place is really a lot of people in the street."
Soliman said that when he beginning participated in protests in Egypt over the police killing of Khaled Said, he was live-tweeting the protests as they were happening.
"Nosotros were all tweeting in English," he added. "To send messages to press and international press club and that nosotros are in the streets and at that place's something happening in Egypt."
"Twitter acted as an amplifier and multiplier of the message," he said. "And likewise Twitter acted as a mode to condolement people to tell them that you are non alone when you get down to the streets."
Many of the 140-character messages that rewrote history in real time during the Egyptian revolution were memorialized in the 2011 volume, "Tweets from Tahrir."
Joan Donovan, the research manager of the Shorenstein Eye on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy Schoolhouse, told ABC News that "activists were early adopters of Twitter and actually gave it its purpose."
"When movements and activists started to use it, it really showed the capabilities of Twitter," she added, noting it was seen across the globe, "from the Egyptian Revolution to the Occupy Wall Street movement in the U.S."
2013 to 2020: #BlackLivesMatter
The hashtag Black Lives Matter start emerged on a Facebook mail service following the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of 17-yr-old Trayvon Martin. The now-global arrangement'south inception is linked to three Blackness organizers: Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi.
Later on its beginning appearance online, the hashtag appeared on Twitter a full of v,106 times in the second half of 2013, co-ordinate to a 2016 Pew Inquiry Center analysis.
In August 2014, the hashtag resurged in response to the police killing of Michael Brownish in Ferguson, Missouri. In the iii weeks following Brown's decease, the hashtag appeared an average of 58,747 times per day on Twitter, according to Pew. Three months afterwards, on Nov. 25, when a Ferguson grand jury did non indict the officeholder involved in Brown'southward death, the hashtag appeared 172,772 times in a single mean solar day and in the subsequent three weeks was used some 1.7 million times.
The hashtag was continually used in the years that followed to draw attention to anti-Black racism and police brutality against Blackness Americans in the U.S.
In May 2020, after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the hashtag once over again exploded on social media as activists and everyday people used it to need change.
Between May 25 and June 15, 2020, an astronomical 390 million tweets in the U.S. were near Blackness Lives Matter, according to visitor data, making upward 17% of all conversations on Twitter in that time. The company said this was nearly 3.8 times whatsoever previous spike in the phrase on Twitter.
Deva Woodly, an associate professor of politics at The New School and the writer of "The Politics of Common Sense: How Social Movements Use Public Discourse to Alter Politics and Win Acceptance," said that she largely credits the offline work of activists in the BLM motion and organizing efforts for giving the movement its global prominence.
"But I think what Twitter had done, because Twitter has a peculiarly large bear on on what mainstream media and not-online media covers, is that folks talking nigh the motility for Black lives under the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter on Twitter shaped the mainstream conversation about the social movement in a manner that they otherwise would not have been able to," Woodly told ABC News.
"Where Twitter and other social media come up in is as very important advice tools, they don't actually create movements or make movements," she added.
Nagler said he views social media as "an accelerant to a lot of things," citing the many cases of police force brutality caught on cellphone video.
"That might not go anywhere if not for social media, because now i person with a cellphone is capable of broadcasting and instantly the whole planet tin see it," he added. "And I think that's the power of social media."
2017: #MeToo
For decades, open discussions around sexual harassment and assault -- particularly in the workplace -- went largely unspoken, enshrouded in taboo and stigma.
That is until a hashtag -- #MeToo -- exploded on Twitter, and eventually led to the toppling of many prominent public figures. The hashtag that opened the floodgates and empowered survivors to share their stories triggered a national reckoning on sexual violence.
While the #MeToo motion existed beforehand, the eruption of the hashtag stemmed from an October 2017 tweet from activist and actress Alyssa Milano every bit Hollywood was being rocked by allegations against Harvey Weinstein.
"If you've been sexually harassed or assaulted write 'me besides' every bit a reply to this tweet," Milano wrote. She shared a photo of text with the tweet that read in role: "If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote 'Me Besides.' equally a condition, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the trouble."
In less than a year, the hashtag #MeToo was used more than 19 million times on Twitter, according to an analysis from the Pew Research Center marking the one-year anniversary of Milano'due south tweet.
This equates to an boilerplate of 55,319 uses of the hashtag per day during that flow, according to Pew.
In the wake of the movement, a New York Times analysis published in October 2018 found that 201 "prominent men" lost their jobs following public allegations of sexual harassment.
2016 to 2020: Trump'southward rising and eventual ban from Twitter
Twitter quickly became the platform of option for former President Donald Trump, who used information technology to communicate directly with his base of operations, arguably more than any other president or presidential candidate earlier, to secure the nomination and pull off an improbable win in 2016.
Politicians are no strangers to Twitter -- Barack Obama still holds the Guinness World Record for most Twitter followers -- but Trump'south utilise of the platform was markedly different than previous administrations. His frenetic, provocative and sometimes erratic tweets introduced new words to the online lexicon (like "covfefe"), had the power to movement stock markets and often took aim at those he didn't like.
News outlets, U.S. lawmakers and even world leaders weren't prophylactic from Trump's Twitter barrages, which he used, gleefully, to communicate with his base of operations, regardless of the consequences.
"My utilise of social media is not Presidential -- it's Modern DAY PRESIDENTIAL," the former president tweeted in July 2017 after taking heat for his Twitter behavior. His penchant for Twitter obviated the need for a traditional printing shop and aides often deferred to Trump'south relentless straight messaging.
"You lot cannot operate a democracy when politicians can easily circumvent any normal forms of accountability that we might get from press or others," Harvard's Donavan said.
Trump's unfiltered remarks, which ofttimes contained inaccuracies or outright falsehoods, were fed straight to his supporters and the world without the ability of the press to enquire questions. Regardless of their truth, his thoughts carried the power of the presidency.
Trump likewise figured out how to "weaponize" Twitter, co-ordinate to Donavan, especially in the backwash of his loss in the 2020 presidential election.
Trump and some of his followers continued to push baseless claims about election fraud, and used Twitter to double down on his refusal to concede. Twitter made efforts to terminate the then-president's fake claims from spreading -- including slapping them with labels that offered more context.
"Office of that weaponization includes political oppression," Donavan said. "And we don't apply those words in the U.S. a lot to depict our politics, but when you lot're a sitting president and you call for a wild protestation, the technology used as a tool for distribution and publication needs to have a plan for that."
Five people died in a riot on January. half dozen, but hours after Trump held a rally and urged his supporters to march to the Capitol. As the world watched the violence escalate, Trump shared a video on his social media accounts telling the protesters to go home, but adding "we honey you" and "y'all're very special."
Trump was acquitted in the Senate of incitement of insurrection after being impeached by the House for an unprecedented 2d time. While the details of what happened that solar day are still existence learned amid a massive federal investigation, Trump has maintained that his speech that day was "totally appropriate."
Two days later on the deadly violence at the Capitol on Jan. 8, Twitter permanently banned Trump.
Dorsey stood past the decision to ban Trump in a wide-ranging Twitter thread, but admitted that it set a "dangerous" precedent. Even some Trump critics questioned the power of Large Tech in its ability to swiftly silence the president and many on the right argued that he had the right to "free speech communication" in his tweets.
Donavan told ABC News that she thinks the ban "was very much likewise tardily."
Not only do free speech arguments not apply to private firms, but Donavan said that in many means Twitter has go more of an "amplification arrangement" than a public space.
"Even in the public square, if you evidence upwards with a PA system, and you want to make certain everybody in the park hears your music, the cops are going to prove upwardly and say, 'Turn it down,'" she said. "And so if we were to reckon with platform company'due south products as amplification systems, and not just empty vessels for voice communication, we may become somewhere policy-wise."
Source: https://abcnews.go.com/Business/twitter-turns-15-back-platform-changed-lives/story?id=75804702
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