Twitter at 20: How we lost the public square

What began as a real-time public forum now functions as a data engine and megaphone for Elon Musk.

BY Chris Stokel-Walker

Twenty years ago, Jack Dorsey changed the world. He opened his phone and sent a message to a new platform he had created: “just setting up my twttr”. That post carries the ID 20. (A post he shared last week has the ID 2032161152470565367—a small detail that captures how dramatically the platform has scaled in the intervening decades.)

Following that first message, Dorsey’s short-form social network quickly cemented its role in our digital lives. In 2009, as a plane landed on the Hudson River in New York, users followed events in real time as people posted from the scene. In........

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