Twitter is a microblogging, social networking service owned by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and retweet tweets, while unregistered users only have the ability to read public tweets. Users interact with Twitter through browser or mobile frontend software, or programmatically via its APIs. Before April 2020, services were accessible via SMS. Tweets were originally restricted to 140 characters, but the limit was doubled to 280 for non-CJK languages in November 2017. Audio and video tweets remain limited to 140 seconds for most accounts.
Twitter was created by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 and launched in July of that year. Twitter, Inc. is based in San Francisco, California and has more than 25 offices around the world. By 2012, more than 100 million users posted 340 million tweets a day, and the service handled an average of 1.6 billion search queries per day. In 2013, it was one of the ten most-visited websites and has been described as "the SMS of the Internet". By the start of 2019, Twitter had more than 330 million monthly active users. In practice, the vast majority of tweets are written by a minority of users. As of 2020, fake accounts were estimated to make up 15% of Twitter accounts, approximately 48 million accounts.On April 25, 2022, the Twitter board of directors agreed to a $44 billion buyout by Elon Musk, making it one of the biggest deals to take a company private. After a protracted period of controversy and legal battles, the deal closed on October 27. Following Musk's takeover, Twitter has been criticized for increasingly promoting hate speech, followed by advertiser moratoriums, mass firings and mass quitting.

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