With Twitter being acquired by Elon Musk, here are five lesser known facts

03/05/2022, INDIA, 08:43 PM

We decided to find out a little more about Twitter, and we were quite surprised…

Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and the world’s richest person, acquired Twitter for $44 billion earlier this week. He plans to take the social networking platform private, and has said that he wants Twitter to be a free speech platform. The acquisition of Twitter, which has over 400 million users including some of the most popular politicians, celebrities and journalists, will have a major impact.

With Musk controlling Twitter, it will mark a shift in its current content moderation policies, which, in recent years, have been aimed at limiting hate speech and reducing misinformation. While many may be familiar with Twitter and the Indian-origin CEO Parag Agrawal, here are five facts about Twitter that may surprise you.

Twitter was nearly called Twitch. “We all looked at the Oxford English dictionary at the T-W’s, and we found the word Twitter,” says co-founder Jack Dorsey in the WNYC interview. “And Twitter means a short inconsequential burst of information, chirps from birds. And we were like, that describes exactly what we’re doing here.” Once the name was finalised, the founding team wasn’t sure about using Twitter “because in certain cultures it could be demeaning,” Dorsey explains. “For example, Twit is not necessarily associated with the best things.” It took two months or so for the team to get used to the name. Twitter paid a “minuscule” amount for Twitter.com, Dorsey says. Incidentally, Dorsey has given Elon Musk his full approval post the acquisition announcement