Usage (left) said after a
Twitter Town Hall with Barack Obama held in July 2011, that Twitter received over 110,000 #Ask
Obama tweets.
Protesters Twitter had been used for a variety of purposes in many industries and scenarios. For example, it has been used to organize protests, including the
protests over the 2009 Moldovan election, the
2009 student protests in Austria, the 2009
Gaza–Israel conflict, the 2009
Iranian green revolution, the 2010
Toronto G20 protests, the 2010
Bolivarian Revolution, the 2010
Stuttgart 21 protests in Germany, the 2011
Egyptian Revolution,
2011 England riots, the 2011 United States
Occupy movement, the 2011
anti-austerity movement in Spain, the 2011
Aganaktismenoi movements in Greece, the 2011
demonstration in Rome, the 2011
Wisconsin labor protests, the 2012
Gaza–Israel conflict, the
2013 protests in Brazil, and the 2013
Gezi Park protests in Turkey. The service was also used as a form of
civil disobedience: In 2010, users expressed outrage over the
Twitter joke trial by copying a controversial joke about bombing an airport and attaching the hashtag #IAmSpartacus, a reference to the film
Spartacus (1960) and a sign of solidarity and support to a man controversially prosecuted after posting a tweet joking about bombing
an airport if they canceled his flight. #IAmSpartacus became the number one trending topic on Twitter worldwide. Another case of civil disobedience happened in the
2011 British privacy injunction debate, where several celebrities who had taken out anonymized injunctions were identified by thousands of users in protest to traditional journalism being censored.
Governments According to documents leaked by
Edward Snowden and published in July 2014, the United Kingdom's
GCHQ has a tool named BIRDSONG for "automated posting of Twitter updates" and a tool named BIRDSTRIKE for "Twitter monitoring and profile collection". During the
2019–20 Hong Kong protests,
Twitter suspended a core group of 1,000 "fake" accounts and an associated network of 200,000 accounts for operating a
disinformation campaign that was linked to the
Chinese government. On June 12, 2020, Twitter suspended over 7,000 accounts from Turkey because those accounts were fake profiles, designed to support the Turkish president,
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and were managed by a central authority. Turkey's communication director said that the decision was illogical, biased, and politically motivated. Turkey blocked access to Twitter twice, once after voice recordings appeared on Twitter in which Erdoğan ordered his son to stash away millions of dollars and another time for 12 hours in the aftermath of the
earthquake of February 2023, when Erdoğan blamed the people for a disinformation campaign as they criticized the Government for their lack of help. In May 2021, Twitter labeled one of the tweets by
Sambit Patra, a spokesman of the local ruling party
BJP in India, as "manipulated media", leading to Twitter's offices in Delhi and
Gurgaon being raided by the local police. Later, the
Indian government released a statement in July 2021 claiming Twitter has lost its liability protection concerning user-generated content. This was brought on by Twitter's failure to comply with the
new IT rules introduced in 2021, with a filing stating that the company failed to appoint executives to govern user content on the platform. In 2025, X sued the Indian government for using the IT Act to block tweets and other content on its platform. According to a report by
Reuters, the United States ran a
propaganda campaign to spread disinformation about the
Sinovac Chinese COVID-19 vaccine, including using fake social media accounts on Twitter to spread the disinformation that the Sinovac vaccine contained pork-derived ingredients and was therefore
haram under
Islamic law. The campaign primarily targeted people in the Philippines and used a social media hashtag for "China is the virus" in
Tagalog. The "super-follow" feature is said to enable competition with the subscription site
OnlyFans, used mainly by sex workers. Many performers use Twitter's service to market and grow their porn businesses, attracting users to paywalled services like OnlyFans by distributing photos and short video clips as advertisements. In April 2022, Twitter convened a "Red Team" for the project of ACM, "Adult Content Monetization", as it is known internally. Eventually, the project was abandoned, because of the difficulty of implementing Real ID.
John Doe et al. v. Twitter, a civil lawsuit filed in the 9th Circuit Court, alleges that Twitter benefited from sex trafficking and refused to remove the illegal tweets when first informed of them. In an
amicus brief filed in the case, the
NCMEC said, "The children informed the company that they were minors, that they had been 'baited, harassed, and threatened' into making the videos, that they were victims of 'sex abuse' under investigation by law enforcement" but Twitter failed to remove the videos, "allowing them to be viewed by hundreds of thousands of the platform's users".
Deepfake pornography In December 2025, social media users reported that X's integrated
chatbot,
Grok, would allow users to non-consensually
strip individuals, including
minors, or show them performing sexually explicit and
pornographic acts. The majority of these prompts were targeted at women and girls. Images generated by Grok since December 2025 have been disproportionately of people in bikinis, transparent clothes, and the like, with users being able to generate such images through prompts such as "put her in a bikini". This scandal would lead to significant criticism from lawmakers across the world, calls for bans on X, as well as legal crackdowns on X and xAI for, amongst other reasons, the facilitation of sexual abuse,
revenge porn, and
child pornography.
Impact Emergency use A practical use for Twitter's real-time functionality is as an effective
de facto emergency communication system for breaking news. It was neither intended nor designed for high-performance communication, but the idea that it could be used for emergency communication was not lost on the creators, who knew that the service could have wide-reaching effects early on when the company used it to communicate during earthquakes. Another practical use that is being studied is Twitter's ability to track epidemics and how they spread. Additionally Twitter serves as a real-time sensor for natural disasters such as bushfires and earthquakes.
Education Twitter has been adopted as a communication and learning tool in educational and research settings mostly in colleges and universities. It has been used as a
backchannel to promote student interactions, especially in large-lecture courses. Research has found that using Twitter in college courses helps students communicate with each other and faculty, promotes informal learning, allows shy students a forum for increased participation, increases student engagement, and improves overall course grades. Twitter has been an increasingly growing in the field of education as an effective tool that can be used to encourage learning and idea, or knowledge sharing, in and outside the classroom. By using or creating hashtags, students and educators are able to communicate under specific categories of their choice to enhance and promote education. A broad example of a hashtag used in education is "edchat", to communicate with other teachers and people using that hashtag. Once teachers find someone they want to talk to, they can either direct message the person or narrow down the hashtag to make the topic of the conversation more specific, using hashtags for scichat (science), engchat (English), sschat (social studies). In that same vein, and with Sigmund Freud in mind, political communications expert Matthew Auer observed that well-crafted tweets by public figures often deliberately mix trivial and serious information so as to appeal to all three parts of the reader's personality: the id, ego, and superego. The poets
Mira Gonzalez and
Tao Lin published a book titled
Selected Tweets featuring selections of their tweets over some eight years. The novelist
Rick Moody wrote a short story for Electric Literature called "Some Contemporary Characters", composed entirely of tweets. Many commentators have suggested that Twitter radically changed the format of reporting due to instant, short, and frequent communication. According to
The Atlantic writers Benjamin M. Reilly and Robinson Meyer, Twitter has an outsized impact on the public discourse and media. "Something happens on Twitter; celebrities, politicians and journalists talk about it, and it's circulated to a wider audience by Twitter's algorithms; journalists write about the dustup." This can lead to an argument on a Twitter feed looking like a "debate roiling the country... regular people are left with a confused, agitated view of our current political discourse". In a 2018 article in the
Columbia Journalism Review, Matthew Ingram argued much the same about Twitter's "oversized role" and that it promotes immediacy over newsworthiness. In some cases, inauthentic and provocative tweets were taken up as common opinion in mainstream articles. Writers in several outlets unintentionally cited the opinions of Russian
Internet Research Agency-affiliated accounts.
World leaders World leaders and their diplomats have taken note of Twitter's rapid expansion and have been increasingly using
Twitter diplomacy, the use of Twitter to engage with foreign publics and their own citizens. US Ambassador to Russia,
Michael A. McFaul has been attributed as a pioneer of international Twitter diplomacy. He used Twitter after becoming ambassador in 2011, posting in English and Russian. On October 24, 2014,
Queen Elizabeth II sent her first tweet to mark the opening of the
London Science Museum's Information Age exhibition. A 2013 study by website Twiplomacy found that 153 of the 193 countries represented at the United Nations had established government Twitter accounts. The same study also found that those accounts amounted to 505 Twitter handles used by world leaders and their foreign ministers, with their tweets able to reach a combined audience of over 106 million followers. The Twitter account for the
pope was set up in 2012. , it has 18 million followers (@Pontifex).
Censorship and moderation X is banned completely in Russia, Iran, China and North Korea, and has been intermittently blocked in numerous countries, including Egypt, Iraq, Nigeria, Turkey, Venezuela and Turkmenistan, on different basis. In 2016, Twitter cooperated with the Israeli government to remove certain content originating outside Israel from tweets seen in Israel. In the 11th biannual transparency report published on September 19, 2017, Twitter said that Turkey was the first among countries where about 90% of removal requests came from, followed by Russia, France and Germany. Twitter stated that between July 1 and December 31, 2018, "We received legal demands relating to 27,283 accounts from 47 different countries, including Bulgaria, Kyrgyzstan, Macedonia, and Slovenia for the first time." As part of evidence to a U.S. Senate Enquiry, the company admitted that their systems "detected and hid" several hundred thousand tweets relating to the
2016 Democratic National Committee email leak. During the curfew in
Jammu and Kashmir after
revocation of its autonomous status on August 5, 2019, the Indian government approached Twitter to block accounts accused of spreading anti-India content; by October 25, nearly one million tweets had been removed as a result. In March 2022, shortly after Russia's censorship of Twitter, a Tor
onion service link was created by the platform to allow people to access the website, even in countries with heavy Internet censorship. In 2025, India ordered X to block 8,000 accounts to users within India, under threat of fines. X criticized the government's orders and encouraged affected users to seek legal recourse. X uses Age Verify with ID or Photo Selfie for users to access sensitive content like pornography in the UK, EU and EEA to comply with
Online Safety Act 2023 and
EU's Digital Service.
Moderation of tweets Twitter removed more than 88,000 propaganda accounts linked to Saudi Arabia. Twitter removed tweets from accounts associated with the Russian
Internet Research Agency that had tried to influence public opinion during and after the 2016 US election. Twitter also removed accounts linked to the governments of Armenia, Egypt, Cuba, Serbia, Honduras, Indonesia and Iran. Twitter suspended Pakistani accounts tied to government officials for posting tweets about the
Kashmir conflict between India and Pakistan. In February 2021, Twitter removed accounts in India that criticized Prime Minister
Narendra Modi's government for its conduct during
Indian farmers' protests in 2020–2021. At the start of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, numerous tweets reported false medical information related to the pandemic. Twitter announced a new policy in which they would label tweets containing misinformation going forward. In November 2020, then Chief Technology Officer and future CEO of Twitter
Parag Agrawal, when asked by
MIT Technology Review about balancing the protection of
free speech as a core value and the endeavour to combat misinformation, said: "Our role is not to be bound by the
First Amendment, but our role is to serve a healthy public conversation ... focus less on thinking about free speech, but thinking about how the times have changed." Musk had been critical of Twitter's moderation of misinformation prior to his acquisition of the company. After the transition, Musk eliminated the misinformation moderation team, and stopped enforcing its policy on labeling tweets with misleading information about coronavirus. While Twitter had joined a voluntary program under the European Union's to fight disinformation in June 2022, Musk pulled the company out of the program in May 2023.
Community Notes In August 2020, development of Birdwatch was announced, initially described as a moderation tool. Twitter first launched the Birdwatch program in January 2021, intended as a way to debunk misinformation and propaganda, with a
pilot program of 1,000 contributors, weeks after the
January 6 United States Capitol attack. The aim was to "build Birdwatch in the open, and have it shaped by the Twitter community". In November 2021, Twitter updated the Birdwatch moderation tool to limit the visibility of contributors' identities by creating aliases for their accounts, in an attempt to limit bias towards the author of notes. Twitter then expanded access to notes made by the Birdwatch contributors in March 2022, giving a randomized set of US users the ability to view notes attached to tweets and rate them, with a pilot of 10,000 contributors. On average, contributors were noting 43 times a day in 2022 prior to the
Russian invasion of Ukraine. This then increased to 156 on the day of the invasion, estimated to be a very small portion of the misleading posts on the platform. By March 1, only 359 of 10,000 contributors had proposed notes in 2022, while a Twitter spokeswoman described plans to scale up the program, with the focus on "ensuring that Birdwatch is something people find helpful and can help inform understanding". By September 2022, the program had expanded to 15,000 users. In October 2022, the most commonly published notes were related to
COVID-19 misinformation based on historical usage. In November 2022, at the request of
new owner Elon Musk, Birdwatch was rebranded to
Community Notes, taking an
open-source approach to deal with misinformation, and expanded to Europe and countries outside of the US.
Court cases, lawsuits, and adjudication Twitter Inc. v. Taamneh, alongside
Gonzalez v. Google, were heard by the
United States Supreme Court during its 2022–2023 term. Both cases dealt with Internet content providers and whether they are liable for terrorism-related information posted by their users. In the case of
Twitter v. Taamneh, the case asked if Twitter and other social media services are liable for
user-generated terrorism content under the
Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 and are beyond their
Section 230 protections. The court ruled in May 2023 that the charges brought against Twitter and other companies were not permissible under the Antiterrorism Act, and did not address the Section 230 question. This decision also supported the Court's
per curiam decision in
Gonzalez returning that case to the lower court for review in light of the
Twitter decision. In 2016, Twitter shareholder Doris Shenwick filed a lawsuit against Twitter, Inc., claiming executives misled investors over the company's growth prospects. In 2021, Twitter agreed to pay $809.5 million to settle. On November 3, 2022, on the eve of expected layoffs, a group of Twitter employees based in San Francisco and Cambridge filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in San Francisco. Naming five current or former workers as plaintiffs, the suit accused the company of violating federal and state laws that govern notice of employment termination. The federal law in question is the
Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act, and the state law in question is California's state WARN Act. On November 20, 2023, X filed a lawsuit against
Media Matters, a media watchdog group. The lawsuit alleges defamation by Media Matters following its publication of a report claiming that advertisements for major brands were displayed alongside posts promoting
Adolf Hitler and the
Nazi Party. On August 6, 2024, X filed an
antitrust lawsuit in the
Northern District of Texas against the
World Federation of Advertisers,
Unilever,
Mars,
CVS and
Ørsted, alleging that the advertisers had conspired via their participation in the Global Alliance for Responsible Media to withhold "billions of dollars in advertising revenue" from the platform. The World Federation Of Advertisers created the Global Alliance for Responsible Media in 2019 to address "illegal or harmful content on digital media platforms and its monetization via advertising". On August 13, 2024, the
Workplace Relations Commission ordered X to pay €550,000 to former senior staffer Gary Rooney in an unfair dismissal case. X had argued that Rooney's failure to check "yes" at the bottom of an email from Elon Musk constituted resignation. In August 2024, the Federal Supreme Court of
Brazil blocked X throughout the country due to their alleged non-compliance to Brazilian judicial rulings. The platform resumed its operations in the country in October 2024, after complying with judicial requests. == Criticism ==