Timeline for Twitter, Inc.
- 2006 March: The Twitter.com micro-blogging and social networking service was founded by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams.
- 2009: The government of China blocked access to Twitter and to Facebook, Inc.
- 2011 March 11: The F.T.C. accepted final settlement terms with Twitter that resolved charges that the social networking site deceived consumers and put their privacy at risk by failing to safeguard their personal information.
- 2012: Twitter introduced clickable 'cashtags' like $AAPL and $GOOG to aggregate financial information on the website.
- 2016: Disney was close to buying Twitter, but pulled out due to various concerns including finding out that a 'substantial portion' of its users were fake (according to former Disney CEO Bob Iger in 2022).
- 2017 October: Twitter banned Russian media outlets RT and Sputnik from advertising on the Twitter website based on the conclusions in the U.S. national intelligence report the previous January that both Sputnik and RT had been used as vehicles for Russia's interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
- 2018 August: The accounts of hatemonger Alex Jones and his Infowars media empire were suspended for a week by Twitter after a review of their content identified seven tweets in violation of Twitter policies. Those tweets have been deleted, per a Twitter representative, and the social network "will continue to review any content that is flagged to us and take action as appropriate". Jones has recently been removed permanently from Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, Apple, and Pinterest.
- 2018 September: Twitter permanently banned hatemonger Alex Jones.
The Year 2 0 1 9
- 2019 January: Facebook's COO Sheryl Sandberg and Twitter's CEO Jack Dorsey resigned from Disney's board over potential conflict of interest related to online video streaming.
- 2019 Jan 31:
Twitter revealed that it had identified and removed troll accounts from five countries trying to manipulate the 2018 midterms; thousands of Twitter accounts from countries including Russia, Iran, and Venezuela were reportedly found to be copying Russia's 2016 interference tactics; many of these accounts were backed by foreign governments and either spread disinformation or inflamed political discourse. These accounts were using the same tactics as the Internet Research Agency, a Moscow-backed group indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller - 418 troll accounts from Russia and 764 troll accounts from Venezuela were using IRA techniques, and another 6,000 U.S.-based posts with misinformation were deleted.
- 2019 May: The Hong Kong Constitutional & Mainland Affairs Bureau proposed measures to prevent 'doxing', or malicious sharing of people's information online, which became common during a wave of 2019 pro-democracy protests.
- 2019 June 25: A letter from the Singapore-based Asia Internet Coalition, an industry group that includes several internet giants, told Hong Kong's government that the planned rules could expose their employees to criminal charges based on what users post, and the only way to avoid them was 'to refrain from investing and offering services in Hong Kong'.
- 2019 Monday July 5: Facebook, Twitter, and Google warned Hong Kong that they would stop serving the Asian financial hub if its government went ahead with data-protection laws that would hold the internet giants responsible for doxing by users.
- 2019 Twitter said Wednesday 8-2019? it was banning all political advertising from its micro-blogging site because social media ads can help politicians and organizations gain an unfair advantage. "While internet advertising is incredibly powerful and very effective for commercial advertisers, that power brings significant risks to politics, where it can be used to influence votes to affect the lives of millions," Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted.
- 2019 Twitter and Facebook said Monday 8-19-2019 that China had used their social media platforms to spread disinformation against Hong Kong pro- democracy protesters. Twitter suspended 936 accounts suspected of links to the effort to "sow political discord in Hong Kong, including undermining the legitimacy and political protest movement on the ground." Twitter said in a blog post that it had evidence pointing to a "coordinated state-backed effort," and it announced it would no longer accept advertising from state-controlled news outlets. Facebook said later it was acting on a tip from Twitter.
- 2019 October: Twitter announced that it would stop running all political advertising on its platform effective November 22; this resulted from spurious claims made by several political ads.CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted, "While internet advertising is incredibly powerful and very effective for commercial advertisers, that power brings significant risks to politics, where it can be used to influence votes to affect the lives of millions."
- 2019 Oct 23: Twitter's stock price fell by nearly 24 percent, from $38.83 to $30.75; the reason was an earnings miss off a third quarter report, which Twitter blamed on ad targeting problems; company CEO Dorsey had been making a concerted effort to dampen the effect that Twitter had on political elections, which entailed banning all political ads, which was seen as a large contributor to the drop. The policy applies globally to all marketing campaigns about political issues.
- 2019 December: Twitter signed for acquisition of Quill - business-focused team messaging service/chat app and rival to Slack - with plans to tap into employee know-how and IP - before Quill shutting down in Dec 2021.
The Year 2 0 2 0
- 2020 July 22: Twitter banned 7,000 QAnon-connected accounts, and put limits on 150,000 others as part of a broad crackdown; Twitter now classifies the QAnon conspiracy cult [est. 2017] as 'coordinated harmful activity' due in part to an increase in harassment targeting high-profile critics of President Donald Trump.
- 2020 July 26: Twitter’s stock plunged more than 19 percent after they reported a drop in user numbers.
- 2020 Aug 19: Twitter suspended 936 accounts suspected of links to an effort by Communist China to spread disinformation against Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters; Twitter said that it had evidence pointing to a "coordinated state-backed effort [to] sow political discord in Hong Kong, including undermining the legitimacy of the political protest movement on the ground", and it announced that it would no longer accept advertising from state-controlled news outlets. Facebook said later that it was acting on a tip from Twitter.
- 2020 Nov 5: Twitter condemned and banned Steve Bannon after Bannon suggests violence as 'a warning to federal bureaucrats’.
- 2020 Nov 17: Twitter launched the "Fleets" disappearing messaging feature.
The Year 2 0 2 1
- 2021 January: An anonymous former Twitter employee testified in Summer 2022 that the company had considered enacting tougher moderation policies after President Trump urged the Proud Boys to "stand back and stand by", but decided against it, in the former employee's opinion because the company 'relished' the power that it had by virtue of Trump's account; the employee said that any other user would have been suspended for the type of incitement Trump engaged in. The employee said that they couldn't sleep on January 5th because they expected bloodshed to take place the following day.
- 2021 Wed Jan 6: Hours before the U.S. Capitol Riot, in an outdoor speech by President Trump, he urged the crowd to 'go wild' to get lawmakers to overturn the election result; Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani called for 'trial by combat' to settle allegations of election fraud, which courts and state election officials from both parties have rejected as false.
- 2021 Wed Jan 6: Violent pro-Trump terrorists stormed the U.S. Capitol Building and tried to derail the process of certifying President-elect Joe Biden's Electoral College victory. They ransacked offices, stole artifacts, broke onto the Senate floor, and sent lawmakers fleeing.
{ details of the January 6th U.S. Capitol Riot and subsequent events are on their own page }
- 2021 May 3: Twitter launched the Spaces live-audio rooms to all users with more than 600 followers.
- 2021 June 3: Twitter announced a paid subscription service known as Twitter Blue, which provides additional premium features to user-members.
- 2021 Wed July 7: Former President Trump said that he was suing Facebook, Google, and Twitter, accusing them of wrongfully censoring him and others; Trump said that he was the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit against the social media giants and their CEOs.
- 2021 Aug 3: Twitter discontinued the "Fleets" stories clone product, after only 8½ months of operation.
- 2021 Friday Oct 1: Former President Trump filed a request for a preliminary injunction against Twitter, asking a federal judge in Florida to force the social media company to reinstate his account; Trump, a formerly prolific Twitter user, was barred from the platform in the wake of the Jan. 6 riot and weeks of using his account to promote false claims of widespread voter fraud during the 2020 presidential election. In the filing, Trump's lawyers argued that Twitter "exercises a degree of power and control over political discourse in this country that is immeasurable, historically unprecedented, and profoundly dangerous to open democratic debate."
- 2021 Oct 21: Twitter announced that any Twitter user can now create a Spaces live-audio room from the Android or iOS app.
- 2021 Dec 11: Twitter shut down Quill, the business-focused team messaging service/chat app purchased in December 2019.
The Year 2 0 2 2
- 2022: Twitter started the year with more than 7,500 employees.
- 2022 Jan 2: Twitter permanently suspended the personal account of Cong. Marjorie Taylor Greene [GOP GA-14] over her posting of COVID-19 misinformation.
- 2022 March 1: Google, Microsoft, Twitter, and Facebook have globally restricted or altogether banned Russian government-backed media outlets from selling ads; Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram will include a label on all posts containing URLs from Russian state-backed media.
- 2022 March 10: Twitter removed two false tweets by Russia's embassy in the United Kingdom due to 'the denial of violent events' during Russia's continuing invasion of Ukraine. One of the tweets said that a photo of casualties in the bombing of a maternity hospital in the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol was staged, and that a pregnant woman shown in the image was actually a Ukrainian 'beauty blogger'. Ukrainian officials said that a child and two adults were killed in the hospital bombing, and 17 others were wounded. Twitter told CNBC that it "took enforcement action" against the posts because "they were in violation of the Twitter Rules, specifically our Hateful Conduct and Abusive Behavior policies related to the denial of violent events."
- 2022 Monday April 4: Twitter shares jumped by 26 percent in pre-market trading on the news that Tesla CEO Elon Musk had acquired a 9.2 percent stake in the social media company; Musk now owns 73,486,938 shares of Twitter, according to a regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. At Friday's closing price, Musk's stake was worth $2.89 billion. Musk is a frequent Twitter user, and a week ago he hinted about shaking up the company.
- 2022 Sunday April 10: Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal tweeted that Tesla CEO Elon Musk had decided not to join Twitter's board. A week ago, the social media company had said in a regulatory filing that the Tesla and SpaceX CEO would join the board and had agreed not to acquire more than 14.9 percent of Twitter's stock. Agrawal said that the reversal was 'for the best' but warned of 'distractions ahead', adding that Musk is 'our biggest shareholder and we will remain open to his input'. Twitter shares fell 8 percent in pre-market trading.
- 2022 April: According to a new SEC filing, there is a breakup fee: Musk would potentially owe Twitter $1 billion if his financing sources fall through; alternatively, Twitter would owe Musk $1 billion if shareholders ultimately reject the offer or if it finds a more attractive buyer; the deal is expected to close by October 24.
- 2022 Thursday April 21: Elon Musk sold 4.4 million shares of Tesla stock, which netted him some $4 billion or so, presumably to be used to finalize the Twitter deal.
- 2022 Tuesday April 26: Tesla Motors shares plunged by 12 percent after news of Tesla CEO Elon Musk might selling Tesla shares to fund his $44 billion Twitter takeover. The decline reduced Tesla's valuation by about $126 billion. The electric-car maker's market capitalization is now down more than $275 billion since Musk revealed that he had become Twitter's biggest shareholder. The value of Musk's 17 percent Tesla stake is now down more than $40 billion. Tesla shares also have been dragged down by a broader selloff fueled by high inflation and slowing economic growth, and by anticipation of Federal Reserve interest hikes.
- 2022 Thursday May 5: Elon Musk secured $7.1 billion in additional funding for his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, decreasing the amount he’ll have to borrow against Tesla shares and giving him a little financial relief;
- the investors include . . .
- Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal: $1.9 billion - one of Twitter’s largest backers already; Alwaleed had previously scoffed at Musk’s bid;
- Larry Ellison, the megarich founder of Oracle: $1 billion - Ellison has a stake in Tesla worth more than $14 billion;
- Sequoia Capital: $800 million - the venture capital giant is a major investor in Musk’s SpaceX;
- crypto exchange Binance: $500 million - the investment is basically a blank check for Elon from CEO Changpeng Zhao;
- VC firm Andreessen Horowitz: $400 million - general partner Ben Horowitz said that “we believe in Elon’s brilliance to finally make [Twitter] what it was meant to be”;
- co-founder & former CEO Jack Dorsey contributed just under $1 billion to the takeover.
- 2022 May 13: Elon Musk tweeted that his deal to buy Twitter is 'temporarily on hold' while he examines the number of spam accounts on the social media site and the calculations behind Twitter's report that false or spam accounts made up less than 5 percent of its 226 million monetizable daily active users.
Twitter data hasn't always checked out: the company said in an earnings report recently that it overcounted daily users by as much as 1.9 million each quarter for three years in a row, because a technical error caused Twitter to count multiple accounts tied to a single user as separate accounts.
- 2022 Tue Sept 13: Twitter's former security chief and whistleblower Peiter 'Mudge' Zatko testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the platform’s privacy and security vulnerabilities, including that "incentives led [company leaders] to prioritize profits over security". Zatko made similar allegations in his
whistleblower complaint; Twitter has responded by saying Zatko's claims were misleading.
- 2022 Sept 13: Musk renews offer to buy Twitter in reversal = Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk has renewed his $44 billion offer to buy Twitter, just weeks before the social media company is scheduled to try to force him in court not to abandon the deal. Musk sent a letter to Twitter offering to buy it at his original price, $54.20 per share, Bloomberg reported Tuesday. Twitter shares shot up 22 percent to close at $52 a share in New York after the news broke. Twitter confirmed it had received the letter and will go through with the deal. Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, told Twitter in July he was backing out of the deal because it had failed to provide adequate data on how many of its accounts are fake. Twitter promptly filed a lawsuit seeking to force him to go through with the purchase.
- 2022 Tue Sept 13: Twitter shareholders on sday 9-13 approved Elon Musk's $44 billion takeover, despite the Tesla CEO's effort to back out of the deal. But senators from both parties expressed concerns.
Elon Musk Takes Over
- 2022 Wed Oct 26: Elon Musk entered the Twitter headquarters building in San Francisco, California for the conclusion of his expected $44 billion purchase of the social media company, then posted a video of himself walking in while carrying a sink (“Let that sink in,” he joked.)
- Musk also changed his Twitter bio to say “Chief Twit”. (The deal to take the company private must close by 5pm on Friday or Musk faces litigation.)
- 2022 late Thursday Oct 27: Elon Musk closed his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter, ending months of drama and legal fighting. Musk reportedly fired the chief executive, the chief finance officer, and at least two other top executives.
- 2022 Friday Oct 28: Immediately after Elon Musk took over ownership of Twitter, racial slurs, Nazi symbols, and misogynistic & anti-LGBTQ hate speech exploded across the platform.
- 2022 Friday Oct 28: General Motors announced that it is 'pausing' its advertising on Twitter as it evaluates Twitter’s new direction under the stewardship of Elon Musk.
- 2022 Thursday Nov 3: Twitter told staff that it would start laying off workers on the following day. News reports have said that Musk plans to lay off up to half of Twitter's workers. Several Twitter employees filed a class action lawsuit saying that the layoffs violate the federal
Worker Adjustment & Retraining Notification Act of 1988, which requires employers with more than 100 employees to provide 60 days' written notice before a layoff affecting 50 or more workers at any single site.
- 2022 November: Tumblr’s iOS downloads surged 62% the week after the Twitter deal closed.
- 2022 Thursday Nov 3: General Mills, Pfizer, Volkswagen/Audi, United Airlines, and Mondelez are among the brands that have 'paused' their advertising on Twitter following Elon Musk’s takeover. Téa Leoni, Shonda Rhimes, Alex Winter, and Sara Bareilles are among the celebrities leaving Twitter following Musk's takeover.
- 2022 Friday Nov 4: Twitter formally announced that it had laid off at least half its workforce, a move that had been widely anticipated; tweets from staff across the brand reportedly confirmed that the employees that were fired were responsible for a variety of roles within Twitter, including communications, content curation, human rights, and machine learning ethics. Musk irrationally justified the recent massive drop in revenue from ad spending as the primary reason for the layoffs.
- 2022 Saturday Nov 5: Twitter launched a subscription service for $8 a month that includes a blue checkmark (available to very few at beginning, expanding in spurts).
- 2022 Sunday Nov 6: News reports revealed that Musk's existing 'inner circle' are actively running Twitter; these guys are Jared Birchall, Jason Calacanis, Sriram Krishnan, David Sacks, and attorney Alex Spiro { see details below }.
- 2022 Monday Nov 7: Corporations that have suspended their advertising on Twitter include: American Express, Coca-Cola, CVS Drugstores, DirecTV, Dyson household appliances, Forbes, Ford Motors, General Mills, General Motors, Johnson & Johnson, Levi Strauss, Mazda, Mondelez, Nintendo, P.B.S., Pfizer, Spotify, Unilever, United Airlines, and Volkswagen (Audi, Porsche).
- 2022 Tuesday Nov 8: Per New York Stock Exchange rules, Twitter was delisted from the exhange; Elon Musk has taken Twitter private and no longer has to share financial information for the social media company; the official merger between Twitter and Musk’s subsidiary X Holdings II, Inc. was complete: X Holdings I, Inc. will now own all the stock of the social network.
- 2022 Tuesday Nov 8: Elon Musk sold some 19.5 million shares of Tesla stock for about $3.5 billion; he had already sold $15.4 billion in the electric car company's shares since his agreement to buy Twitter was announced earlier this year.
- 2022 Nov 9: Elon Musk abruptly scrapped the Twitter 'official' checkmark option just hours after launch.
- 2022 Nov 9: Shares of Tesla Motors, the world's most valuable automaker, dropped 7.2 percent to their lowest level in two years after the news that CEO Elon Musk had sold another $3.95 billion worth of the electric-vehicle maker's stock, fueling concerns about fallout at Tesla from his $44 billion deal to acquire Twitter. Tesla is down nearly 60 percent from its November 2021 record.
- 2022 Thu Nov 10: Several top security and privacy executives resigned from Twitter, citing the rapid rollout of new features without proper security reviews and Elon Musk’s order that employees return to the office; Chief Information Security Officer Lea Kissner resigned, and the company’s Chief Privacy Officer and the Chief Compliance Officer also quit.
- 2022 Thu Nov 10: The Federal Trade Commission is closely watching Twitter’s moves under new owner Elon Musk; the statement comes after several key security and privacy executives resigned or were dismissed following Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter; the regulatory agency can hold Twitter to specific security and privacy standards under a recent settlement. The new consent decree requires Twitter to start enhanced privacy & security programs, which are to be audited by a third party, and Twitter is required to conduct a privacy assessment of any new products that it launches.
- 2022 Sun Nov 13: SpaceX, which is led by Elon Musk, bought a major advertising package on Twitter, which is led by Elon Musk.
- 2022 Mon Nov 14: Another firing spree at Twitter; this time, thousands of independent contractors working for the company, many of whom did content moderation and data science and were in foreign countries, have been abruptly let go; news reports say that 4,400 of the 5,500 or so contractors working for Twitter were abruptly dumped.
- 2022 Tue Nov 15: The leadership team at Twitter fired nearly two dozen employees who had criticized Musk's changes at the social media company, per The New York Times.
- 2022 Wed Nov 16: Elon Musk told Twitter employees to commit to a new 'hardcore' version of the social media company or quit with severance pay; the official email gave workers an icon to click and gave them until Thursday to say whether they would stick around. Musk also said that he would eventually hire someone else to run Twitter.
- 2022 Thu Nov 17: Massive engineer exodus after Musk ultimatum left Twitter on brink; more key engineers left than anticipated, which one employee said could cause the system to 'stop' if it hits a problem. Musk and some of his advisers met with some 'critical' employees, hoping to get them to stay.
- 2022 Sat Nov 19: C.B.S. News suspended Twitter posting by reporters ‘in light of the uncertainty’ about the Musk-owned social platform
- 2022 Sat Nov 19: A little more than three weeks into Musk’s ownership of the company, Twitter’s employee base has shrunk to about 33% its former size.
- 2022 Sat evening Nov 19: Elon Musk, Twitter CEO, reactivated the account of former President Donald Trump, after an online poll favored 51.8% to 48.2% to allow the former president back on Twitter; Trump had previously been barred from the platform due to his inflammatory rhetoric; the former president previously said, however, that he may not use his reinstated account.
The Year 2 0 2 3
- 2023 January: According to reports from security researchers & media outlets, usernames and email addresses belonging to more than 200 million Twitter users have been posted online by hackers; the stolen credentials were compiled from a number of earlier Twitter breaches dating back to 2021. Although the database does not include users’ passwords, it nevertheless represents a security threat to those affected. Screenshots of the stolen data show that it contains a number of text files listing email addresses and linked Twitter usernames, as well as users’ real names (if they shared them with Twitter), their follower counts, and account creation dates; the database was being sold on one hacking forum for as little as $2. All internet users are being encouraged to use unique passwords for each online service and to enable multi-factor authentication for each of their accounts where it is available.
- 2023 May 30: According to Fidelity, Twitter's stock market valuation is one-third of the $44 billion that Elon Musk paid for the company.
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![The Twitter headquarters building [built 1937] on Market Street in San Francisco, California](images2/TwittenSFO.jpg "The Twitter headquarters building [built 1937] on Market Street in San Francisco, California")
![The Twitter headquarters building [built 1937] on Market Street in San Francisco, California - photo at night](images2/TwitterHQinSFO-night.jpg "The Twitter headquarters building [built 1937] on Market Street in San Francisco, California - photo at night")
divisions & subsidiaries
