On October 27, 2022, business magnate Elon Musk acquired Twitter for US$44 billion, gaining control of the platform. In 2020, it was estimated that approximately 48 million accounts (15% of all accounts) were fake. In practice, the vast majority of tweets are produced by a minority of users. By the start of 2019, Twitter had more than 330 million monthly active users. In 2013, it was one of the ten most-visited websites and has been described as 'the SMS of the Internet'. By 2012, more than 100 million users produced 340 million tweets a day, and the service handled an average of 1.6 billion search queries per day. Its former parent company, Twitter, Inc., was based in San Francisco, California and had more than 25 offices around the world. Twitter was created by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 and launched in July of that year. Users interact with Twitter through browser or mobile frontend software, or programmatically via its application programming interfaces (APIs). Registered users can post, like, repost, comment and quote posts, and direct message other registered users.

On Twitter, users can post texts, images and videos known as 'tweets'. Twitter, currently rebranding to X, is an online social media and social networking service operated by the American company X Corp., the successor of Twitter, Inc.

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