A new CNN series “Twitter: Breaking the Bird” follows the insider story behind the meteoric rise and eventual sale of the revolutionary app featuring the voices of the founders themselves. The four-part series airs on Sundays at 10pm ET/PT from March 9th – 30th.
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Tech founders don’t always know what their products will become or how people will eventually use them. That’s what happened with Twitter, early employees of the company told CNN in a new documentary series called “Twitter: Breaking the Bird.”
The original version of Twitter reflected the early internet of the time — and the radical, optimistic vision for what its founders believed the online world could be. But over the subsequent two decades Twitter had to grapple with what it truly meant to give anyone a voice on the internet, including those who would use that voice to spread hate speech or seek power in ways the founders never saw coming.
“There was a lot going on. There’s not really time in the day to contemplate the much larger implications of what we’re building,” Twitter founder Evan Williams said in the series, reflecting on Twitter’s early days.
Of course, the world now knows what Twitter has become.
The company, now called X, is owned by Elon Musk; the world’s richest man has used it to help reelect President Donald Trump and continues to use it to push his own political and social agenda as he seeks to reshape the US government. White supremacists and disinformation peddlers have been welcomed back to the platform, even as some longtime users try to cling to its utility for sharing real-time news and information. And while Twitter long struggled to turn its influence into a profitable business, the company’s value is more questionable now than ever after Musk’s controversial policies alienated advertisers.
The “Breaking the Bird” series pulls back the curtain on how the company got here. It chronicles Twitter’s history — from its creation by a group of counter-culture founders and its chaotic leadership struggles to presidents and political candidates learning how to tweet and, ultimately, to Musk’s dramatic $44 billion takeover.
“We built this thing that took on a life of its own that has these bad elements and these good elements and the battle is trying to have the good outweigh the bad,” Williams said in a later episode. “And that’s what felt like a maybe losing battle over time. Like, is it worth it? Is this whole idea flawed?”
X did not respond to a request for comment.
In many ways, the world — online and offline — has changed in ways no one could have predicted when Twitter was founded in 2006. At the time, Facebook had only just been released to the public, and weblogs were all the rage. Mobile apps didn’t even exist yet, as the iPhone wouldn’t launch for another year.
When Twitter launched, much of its content was relatively unserious. In its first year, co-founder Jack Dorsey posted things like “walk home. Cold”; Stone posted “eating a baked potato and green beans with bbq seitan and white wine.”
“I think you have a notion of what you’re doing, you have a hunch, but the fog of uncertainty is pretty dense,” Jason Goldman, Twitter’s first head of product, who later served as chief digital officer in the Obama White House, said in an interview ahead of the series’ release. “That’s why there’s this natural sort of bias towards action in the tech industry, which is like, let’s move forward. Let’s try to do something, and we’ll launch that, and we’ll see what people do with it.”
As Twitter grew, people used it in positive ways its founders hadn’t expected, too, including to organize social movements like the Arab Spring and Black Lives Matter.
At the center of Twitter’s story is Dorsey, the billionaire who is widely viewed as the father of the platform. His values and code are written into Twitter’s foundation; he ran the company for a combined eight years (from 2006 to 2008, and again from 2015 to 2021) and may have ultimately helped tee up Musk’s acquisition.
Dorsey always envisioned Twitter as being a place to promote free expression. “A platform, in order to be a platform, has to be free … I think we need to hear every extreme,” he said in a 2016 interview at the Code conference.
But that also meant he was sometimes slow to tackle the platform’s issues.
Del Harvey, the company’s longtime former head of trust and safety, said in the series that Twitter hadn’t “invest(ed) a lot in” those areas as of 2017, when the social media site faced mounting pressure to address the spread of hate and abuse
In 2020, Dorsey invited Musk to call into a company-wide meeting. “By the way, do you want to run Twitter?” he asked the billionaire Tesla CEO and Twitter superuser, along with a question about how he would fix the social media platform.
Musk responded that staff should address “people trying to manipulate the system … they’re trying to sway public opinion and sometimes it can be very difficult to figure out what’s real public opinion and what’s not.” It was just two years later that Musk would begin taking a financial stake in Twitter that would set the stage for his acquisition.
Looking back, there’s more Twitter’s early team could have done to uphold its original vision, Goldman said. However, he said, Twitter’s fate may have been unavoidable.
“Our intent was that it would be used for these delightful use cases … and that we would treat the things that we didn’t like as essentially bugs of the system,” Goldman said. “But the reality is that some of those things, those use cases — such as becoming a dominant propaganda tool for a rising right-wing, authoritarian ideology, both domestically and around the world — that is not a bug, that is a feature of the tool.”
