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A tweet (officially known as a post since 2023) is a short status update on the social networking site Twitter (officially known as X since 2023) which can include Image, Video, , , , mentions, and . Around 80% of all tweets are made by 10% of users, averaging 138 tweets per month, with the median user making only two tweets per month.
Following the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk in October 2022, and rebranding of the site as "X" in July 2023, all references to the word "tweet" were removed from the service, changed to "post", and "retweet" changed to "repost". The terms "tweet" and "retweet" are still more popular when referring to posts on X.
Increasing the limit had been a topic of discussion inside the company for years, and had been resurfaced in 2015 for ways to grow the userbase. At the time, internal discussion also involved excluding links and mentions from the character limit. By January 2016, an internal product named "Beyond 140" was in development, targeting Q1 of the same year for expanding tweet limits. By the end of 2015, the company was moving close to introducing a 5,000 or 10,000 character limit. An unfinalized version had tweets that went over the old 140 character threshold only showing the first 140 characters, with a call-to-action that there was more in the tweet. Clicking on the tweet would reveal the rest, which was done to retain the same feel of the timeline.
The change was controversial internally and met with backlash by users. Dorsey confirmed that the 140 character limit would remain, but had told employees upon his return as CEO that the once-sacred aspects of Twitter were no longer untouchable.
In May 2016, a week after being leaked, Twitter announced that media attachments (images, GIFs, videos, polls, quote tweets) nor mentions in replies would no longer increase the character limit to be rolled out later in the year to ready developers. The changes rolled out in September, except for the @replies, which were tested in October and then rolled out in March 2017, a year after the original announcement. These changes were a compromise to internal resistance to a 10,000 character limit from the year before.
On September 26, 2017, Twitter announced the company was testing doubling the character limit—from 140 to 280. It was an effort for users to be more expressive with their tweets, as users were otherwise cramming ideas into a single tweet by rewriting and removing vowels, or not tweeting at all. It began testing to a small group of users in all languages, excluding Japanese, Chinese language, and Korean language, because CJK characters can say double the amount of information in one character. According to the company's statistics, 0.4% of tweets in Japanese hit the 140 character ceiling, while 9% of tweets in English hit the ceiling. Users not in the test group were able to see and interact with them normally.
The change was similarly controversial internally as the 10,000 character limit proposal. The immediate reaction by Twitter users was largely negative.
It was tested with some accounts in the US, Canada, and South Korea. The company noted during the test that the feature may be turned off and all CoTweets deleted. The feature was spotted in code in December 2021.
On January 31, Twitter suddenly and quietly decided to stop new CoTweets from being made, though noted that it could return in the future. CoTweets were able to be seen for another month, before being converted to a normal tweet for the first author, and a retweet for the second author. Though Twitter's support page offered a generic reasoning for discontinuing the feature, Elon Musk said that it was to focus on allowing users to add text attachments.
Likes used to be public and they are not broadcast to the user's tweets timeline. When likes were public, users would often forget their likes were public or liked more revealing tweets. High-profile users and politicians' accounts have liked pornographic, hateful, and racist tweets. For instance, in 2017, Ted Cruz's account liked a tweet with a two-minute porn video about a day after it was posted. Cruz said that many people had access to his account and one of his staff members pressed the like button in "an honest mistake".
Likes would later be privatized for all users profiles, with Elon Musk stating "Public likes are incentivizing the wrong behavior", and encouraging users to like more Tweets without fear of being noticed. Likes are now anonymous, except to the author of the tweet, and to the person who liked it. Verified users could choose to private their likes prior to the update.
When not logged in, users' tweets are sorted by how many likes they received, opposed to reverse-chronological.
The development was revealed to in October 2017. The feature, highly requested by Japanese users, started from an annual hack week at the company and called "#ShareForLater". Previously, users would resort to liking the tweet or by sending it to themselves. Liking tweets is often seen as an endorsement or positive endorsement, and the likes are public and are notified to the user who made the tweet. The feature was tested in November for some users, and rolled out in February 2018 on mobile alongside a new share menu. The web version of Twitter did not test the bookmark feature until November 2018 When released, the user who made the tweet would have been unaware that a tweet was bookmarked.
On March 26, then-US president Donald Trump made two false statements about mail-in ballots, claiming they were "substantially fraudulent". Within 24 hours of the tweet, Twitter's general counsel and the acting head of policy jointly decided to label Trump's tweets, with several hours of internal debate from company leaders, and then-CEO Jack Dorsey signed off on the decision shortly before the label was applied. The labels, which told readers to "Get the facts about mail-in ballots", was the first time they were applied to Trump's tweets. A spokesperson for Twitter said that the tweets contained "potentially misleading information about voting processes and have been labeled to provide additional context around mail-in ballots". The label linked to articles by CNN, The Washington Post, and The Hill, as well as summaries of claims of fraud.
Three days later, a tweet about the George Floyd protests in Minneapolis–Saint Paul was hidden from view.
Prior to the transfer of Twitter to Elon Musk, Community Notes were officially called Birdwatch.
The Iconfactory was developing a Twitter application in 2006 called "Twitterrific" and developer Craig Hockenberry began a search for a shorter way to refer to "Post a Twitter Update." In 2007 they began using "twit" before Twitter developer Blaine Cook suggested that "tweet" be used instead.
"Tweet" was added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary in 2011 and to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2012. Both its use as a verb and noun were added. This was notable as the Oxford English Dictionary normally waits ten years after the coining of a word to add it to the dictionary.
In 2023, the terms "tweet" and "retweet" were quietly retired in favor of the terms "post" and "repost", as a part of Twitter's rebrand to X, but many users continue to use the former terms on the platform.
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