They helped start Twitter. They didn't notice what it would be

A new CNN series “Twitter: Breaking the Bird” follows the insider story behind the meteoric rise and the later sale of the revolutionary app with the voices of the founders themselves. The four -part series is broadcast on Sundays at 10 p.m. ET/PT from March 9 to 30.

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Tech founder does not always know what your products will be or how people will use at some point. This happened with Twitter, said early employees of the company CNN in a new one Documentary film series entitled “Twitter: Breaking the Bird”.

The original version of Twitter reflected the early internet of time – and the radical, optimistic vision for what its founders believed that the online world could be. But in the following two decades, Twitter had to deal with what it really meant to give someone a voice on the Internet, including those who would use this voice to spread hate speeches or to find strength in a way that the founders never saw.

“There was a lot going on. The day is not really time to think about the much greater effects of what we are building, ”said Twitter founder Evan Williams in the series and reflected Twitter early days.

Of course, the world now knows what has become Twitter.

The company, now called X, belongs to Elon Musk; The richest man in the world used it to re -select President Donald Trump, and continues to use his own political and social agenda while trying to redesign the US government. White supremacists and disinformation heddlers have remained on the platform, even if some long -time users try to stick to their utility for the transfer of messages and information in real time. And while Twitter fought for a long time to transform his influence into a profitable business, the value of the company is now more questionable than ever before Musk has alienated the advertisers.

The “Breaking the Bird” series withdraws the curtain how the company came here. It draws the story of Twitter upside down by a group of founders of counterculture and its chaotic leadership fights against presidents and political candidates who learn how to tweet and ultimately to Musk's dramatic takeover of $ 44 billion.

“We built this thing that has assumed its own life that has this bad elements and this good elements, and the struggle tried to outweigh the good ones,” said Williams in a later episode. “And over time it felt like a perhaps a lost fight. Is it worth it? Is this whole idea faulty? ”

X did not answer a request for comments.

In many ways, the world – online and offline – has changed in a way that no one could predict when Twitter was founded in 2006. At that time Facebook had just been published to the public, and weblogs were the last scream. Mobile apps didn't even exist because the iPhone would not start for another year.

When Twitter started, a large part of his content was relatively bad. In his first year, co -founder Jack Dorsey published things like “going home. Cold “; Stein released” baked potato and green beans with BBQ Seitan and white wine. ”

“I think you have an idea of ​​what you do, you have an idea, but the fog of uncertainty is pretty dense,” said Jason Goldman, Twitter's first product manager, who later acted as Chief Digital Officer in the Obama White House, in an interview before the series was published. “That is why there is this natural kind of bias in the direction of action in the Tech industry that drive us forward. Let's try something and we'll start and we will see what people do with it. ”

When Twitter grew, people used it in a positive way, as the founders had not expected, also to organize social movements such as Arab Spring and the Black Lives Matter.

At the center of Twitter's story is Dorsey, the billionaire who is generally seen as the father of the platform. His values ​​and code are written in Twitter's foundation. He headed the company together for eight years (from 2006 to 2008) (from 2006 to 2008Present And again from 2015 to 2021) and may have helped improve Musk's acquisition.

Dorsey always set himself as a place to promote the free expression. “A platform to be a platform must be free … I think we have to hear everyone extremely,” he said in an interview 2016 at the code conference.

However, this also meant that sometimes he slowly fought the problems of the platform.

Del Harvey, the company's long -time former trust and security manager, said in the series that Twitter did not “invest” these areas from 2017 than the social media

In 2020 Dorsey Musk invited to call a company -wide meeting. “By the way, do you want to run Twitter?” He asked the CEO and Twitter superuser from billionaire Tesla and a question of how to fix the social media platform.

Musk replied that the employees should appeal to people who try to manipulate the system. They try to influence public opinion, and sometimes it can be very difficult to find out what real public opinion is and what is not. ” Just two years later, Musk began a financial participation in Twitter, which would create the stage for his acquisition.

In retrospect, it could have done more Twitter's early team to maintain its original vision, said Goldman. However, he said that the fate of Twitter might have been inevitable.

“Our intention was that it would be used for these delightful applications … and that we would treat the things that we did not like as mistakes in the system,” said Goldman. “But the reality is that some of these things, these application cases z. B. a dominant propaganda instrument for an up-and-coming right, authoritarian ideology, both in Germany and on the whole world-das is not a mistake, this is a feature of tools.”