20 years since the first tweet: He was the voice of the revolution, got a new name. How important is X today?

From status to the global stage

The initial idea was just the digital equivalent of asking “what do you do?”, but the platform quickly outgrew that role. The turning point occurred at the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference in March 2007, when the daily volume of tweets tripled from 20,000 to 60,000 overnight. In the same year, user Chris Messina proposed the use of the ladder symbol (#), now known as a hashtag, to group topics, and the “retweet” option was soon introduced. This laid the groundwork for virality.

By 2010, Twitter had become a key tool of the Arab Spring, confirming what no one could have predicted in 2006: that the 140-character limit, applied on a global scale, could reshape journalism, politics and public discourse in a way that traditional media had never achieved. It has become a place where news is published in seconds, not hours.

Internal wars and the era of Elon Musk

While the platform was growing publicly, drama was unfolding within the company. One of the founders, Noah Glass, whose role was key in the early development and who came up with the name “Twitter”, was pushed out of the company by a larger company. in 2006, and his role was hidden for years. Conflicts between Dorsey and Williams about vision and direction followed, resulting in changes at the head of the company.

However, no earthquake was equal to that of October 2022, when Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion. What followed was one of the most dramatic transformations in the history of social media. The company was delisted, 80 percent of employees were laid off, and the name was changed to X. The iconic blue bird became history, and Musk announced a vision of an “app for everyone,” modeled after China’s WeChat, that would unify communication, payments, and news.

Changes under Musk: Disinformation and the return of Trump

Musk’s rule began under the auspices of “freedom of speech absolutism”. In practice, this meant a drastic reduction of content moderation teams and the introduction of new, looser rules. The result was a documented rise in hate speech, fake news and targeted disinformation campaigns, which drove away many major advertisers.

A key moment happened forever. in November 2022, when Musk, after conducting a survey on his own profile, returned the permanently suspended account of Donald Trump. Trump was kicked off the platform after the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021 due to the risk of further inciting violence. His return to X became a symbol of the new era of the platform, and the returned account was a key tool in his successful presidential campaign in 2024 and remains one of the main communication tools of his administration.

Platform in numbers: Shock and stabilization

The data for the year 2026 approach structural decline and partial stabilization. The platform did not collapse. It lost casual users and large advertisers, but retained its core of over 388 million active monthly users. According to data from analytics company Onclusive, 29.2 percent of global Internet users over the age of 16 use X at least once a month.

However, the use is extremely unequal geographically. In Nigeria, the platform is used by 80.7 percent of Internet users, while in Western European countries such as Germany (16.1 percent) or France (21.7 percent), it is still primarily a tool for the media, politicians and professionals. Demographically, X is a very male platform – about 64 percent of users are male, and this difference is visible across all age groups.

Global event monitor in real time

Despiteč despite all the changes, X has retained one unique ability: functioning as a global information layer for live events. Whether it’s the final of the World Cup, the announcement of a verdict or the resignation of a political leader, X is the place where journalists, experts and international leaders are the first to publish information. About 500 million posts are published daily, and a peak of 24,400 posts per second was recorded during the 2022 World Cup final.

This is exactly why X is still important. As many as 59.7 percent of active users come to the platform primarily for news and current events, which is more than any other social network. For PR professionals, journalists and analysts, X remains an indispensable tool for tracking the world in real time.

Nevertheless, academic research published in recent years consistently indicates a decline in the average quality of information and measurably algorithmic amplification of biased contentwhich poses a serious risk to brands and informed public discourse.