Yesterday, 21 March 2026, marked the twentieth anniversary of the first tweet: 'just setting up my twttr', as posted by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and still available on the platform. But that Twitter, or indeed twttr, is long gone, replaced by the bot-infested far-right hangout that resulted from Twitter's enxittification under present-day owner Elon Musk.
On this twentieth birthday, to commemorate the Twitter that was, and commiserate over the Xitter it has become, my friends at GESIS in Cologne interviewed me on the sidelines of the Social Media Access Days last week, and that interview is now online on the GESIS blog.
In addition, my colleagues and I at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre also recorded a special edition of our Read Them Sideways podcast, featuring Jean Burgess, Kateryna Kasianenko, and Luke Pearson in conversation with host Kate FitzGerald about what made Twitter great, what makes Xitter terrible, and how we got from one to the other. You can listen to it right here:
And of course, if you'd like to travel back to a different time in the history of Twitter, and of social media more generally, you could always also re-read our excellent 2014 collection Twitter and Society, available for download in its entirety under a Creative Commons licence:
Katrin Weller, Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess, Merja Mahrt, and Cornelius Puschmann, eds. Twitter and Society. New York: Peter Lang, 2014.
So farewell, Twitter. May your end be swift and painless – and soon.
