X (social network)
American social networking service founded in 2006

X, formerly known as Twitter, is an American microblogging and social networking service owned by SpaceX's artificial intelligence subsidiary SpaceXAI. It is one of the world's largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, images, and videos in short posts (commonly and unofficially known as "tweets", in reference to the site's former terminology for the format) and like other users' content. The platform also includes direct messaging, video and audio calling, bookmarks, lists, communities, Grok chatbot integration, job search, and a social audio feature (X Spaces). Users can vote on context added by approved users using the Community Notes feature.
The platform was created in March 2006 as Twitter by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams, and was launched in July of that year; initially named twttr, it was renamed Twitter some months later. The platform grew quickly; by 2012 more than 100 million users produced 340 million daily tweets. Twitter, Inc., was based in San Francisco, California, and had more than 25 offices around the world. A signature characteristic of the service initially was that posts were required to be brief. Posts were initially limited to 140 characters, which was changed to 280 characters in 2017. The limitation was removed for subscribed accounts in 2023.
“X (social network)” enters the record as american social networking service founded in 2006. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what social, network and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“X (social network)” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, social, network and American provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q918. The first chronological checks are 2006, 2012, 2017 and 2023.
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This entry incorporates text from “X (social network)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.