Twitter

""Brevity is the soul of wit.""

- Shakespeare, Hamlet (follow his Twitter here)

""passive aggressive pissy angry village of spoiled brats and people who think they're famous.""

- The top definition for the site on Urban Dictionary as of September 30, 2022

Twitter is a microblogging and social networking service created by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 and launched in July of that year. On Twitter, registered users can post, like, and retweet tweets, which can be anything from mundane reporting on one's life, a wry one-liner, or the start of an Internet campaign that will snowball and end up with international media coverage. Really, for 280 characters - which used to be 140 until near the end of 2017 - there's lots of potential.

By 2012, more than 100 million users posted 340 million tweets a day, and the service handled an average of 1.6 billion search queries per day. In 2013, it was one of the ten most-visited websites and has been described as "the SMS of the Internet". At the start of 2019, Twitter had more than 330 million monthly active users, though in practice the vast majority of tweets are written by a minority of users. In 2022, the site was acquired by Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk - the circumstances of the acquisition and decisions made following it have been the source of major criticism from the userbase, up to and including even the former CEO, and ultimately made a lot of people very unhappy and been regarded as a bad move.

The site's open, public API allows for its adaptation and use on many different platforms. Android, iPhone, browser extension, desktop software, mobile phone... you can tweet from just about every device going. Hell, you can even monitor tweets with a typewriter! The real-time search function allows you to search all (public) tweets being made for any word or phrase you wish, and is one of the most popular aspects of the site. This is combined with the "trending topics", a list of the ten most popular topics at the moment, based on how much they're being tweeted about.

Twitter is notable for being one of the first Friending Network-type sites (aside from work-oriented LinkedIn) in which thirty-something media professionals outnumber teenagers. It also helps that the age range of the userbase is incredibly varied, from the 16-year-old intermittent poster to the 50-year-old Twitter addict. On the note of teenagers, Twitter is naturally also a major hub for a significant chunk of fandom: tropes abound in abundance as posts and threads circulate about users' favorite works and their attempts to analyze them, and a plethora of themed and sometimes-weirdly-specific accounts are dedicated to specific subjects, tropes and other happenings - all with varying quality and results, for better and for worse.

Twitter has a particular penchant for the worse, which is as much a result of Twitter's pre-existing reputation as Internet Backdraft central as it is a consequence of said fans' actions - such a dynamic became even more pronounced after Tumblr's ban of NSFW content on December 17th, 2018, as the exodus drove many of the site's former users to Twitter.

Since its inception, Twitter has gone from just a major source of media attention to a major fixture of society comparable to Facebook Meta, and has been used for various purposes from people organizing protests and civil disobedience to governments engaging with foreign publics and their own citizens. Major events tend to be covered rapidly through the system, and practically every celebrity in Hollywood has a Twitter account.

You can follow All The Tropes on Twitter, or browse All The Tropes "Twitter-style" in the Laconic namespace.


 * The Classic Doctor Who Twitter Blog
 * Everyman HYBRID


 * First World Problems: The trope name originated from a Twitter hashtag, and the site itself is an excellent platform for short moanings about daily life and our miserable existences by people who are generally well-enough off.

"@radtoria: People who are offended when I breastfeed in public need to STFU. What I'm doing is natural and strengthens the bond between me and my dog."
 * A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Microsoft learned this the hard way when they launched Tay AI on Twitter and other social networks. Posting under the username @TayandYou, Tay AI was an experimental learning chatbot with an emoji-laced, stereotypical semi-literate teen vocabulary («hellooooooo w🌎rld!!!») that was meant to learn how to chat from the Internet and become more literate. It worked - the AI quickly fell into shitposting, to lots of embarrassment and booing and hissing from all sides (if not simultaneously).
 * Alt Text: Twitter uses this as an accessibility feature, particularly to describe images for blind or otherwise sight-impaired users that use screen readers.
 * Arrogant Kung Fu Guy: Parodied with the DeepLeffen bot account. The bot is designed to mimic and exaggerate the behavior of Super Smash Bros. Melee pro player Leffen, who has a reputation for arrogance and belittling of other players in the Melee community (particularly on the Internet) to the point of being banned for a year from European tournaments in February 2013.
 * Augmented Reality Game: Some games and other works such as Deltarune and Zombies, Run! occasionally use Twitter as part of one.
 * Bait and Switch: Employed in many a classic viral tweet such as this.

"Guy who has only seen The Boss Baby, watching his second movie: Getting a lot of 'Boss Baby' vibes from this..."
 * Banned in China: Twitter is among the many sites blocked or heavily filtered by China's "Great Firewall".
 * Beige Prose: While many a user tends towards multi-tweet threads on multiple subjects, it's still impressive how much you can say within 280 characters.
 * Big Brother Is Watching: According to the Terms of Service; Didn't Read website, Twitter "ignores the Do Not Track (DNT) header and tracks users anyway even if they set this header".
 * Assertions of shadowbanning tend to run into a mixture of this trope and Streisand Effect, with any relatively popular figure who suspects they've been shadowbanned often finding a swell of support from outside their audience. This occurs due to a legitimate distrust in "big tech" platforms and their lack of transparency, combined with animosity towards a lack of support for a desired person or cause - though it also occurs independently of whether or not the cause would be worth supporting on its own, resulting in Right for the Wrong Reasons; this occurs often enough that, it can appear to be a form of "agitation"-style propaganda if viewed through a cynical lens, and has certainly been used as such by more unscrupulous users.
 * The alleged shadowbanof Dilbert creator Scott Adams - while this didn't do much to harm his image (at least, not much more harm than he would eventually do to it himself), it contributed to Twitter censorship becoming widely infamous, which ultimately didn't help its reputation and stocks.
 * Brian Niemeier similarly asserted that he was shadowbanned by Twitter, which increased his Twitter following by 6% and attracted more interest in him outside it for quite a while.
 * The 2018 hacks of high-profile Twitter accounts had the side effect of verifying that Twitter is capable of and has indeed shadowbanned people despite their insistence to the contrary, due to admin tools that granted those capabilities themselves being showcased in the coverage. A story from the same year by Slate also indicated that Twitter planned to hide tweets that "detract" from the conversation. As indicated by Will Stancil, Elon also announced intent to implement a very similar system called "deboosting" within weeks of taking ownership of the site in November 2022; he described this policy using the phrase "freedom of speech, not freedom of reach". This was after he made the news for unbanning several high-profile accounts that had recently been suspended for hateful conduct.
 * Unfortunately, no one appears to have sent that memo to Matt Tabibi or Bari Weiss, whose "Twitter Files" expose purported to reveal Twitter as this. The idea was that the threads would show how "teams of Twitter employees build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics—all in secret, without informing users"... all in complete ignorance of the above stories confirming this back in 2018, and the recent decision made by Elon.
 * Note that this was only ever made possible in the first place because of the access given to her and other reporters by Elon Musk himself. Furthermore, the controversy is raising alarms among other prominent users of the site about one particular user - LibsOfTikTok, an account known for being allowed to remain on the site despite multiple suspensions for violating policy by directing hate towards vulnerable groups. This naturally drew accusations of preferential treatment, which was inadvertently confirmed in the eyes of many... by Bari Weiss. All of this was done while increasing the odds of running headlong into GDPR violations - just to reiterate what many considered to be already widely known.
 * Broken Pedestal: Common to the point of being ubiquitous - it's said to "never meet your heroes" for a reason.
 * A lot of popular users are also self-conscious of their reach and influence, and some will go to absurd lengths in order to prevent this trope and preserve it from what they believe to be threats. That's all to be said about that.
 * CamelCase: Used for hashtags and more commonly usernames.
 * Celebrity Paradox: Between the sizable RP community that existed back in the day and the early celeb presence on the site, this was bound to happen - one particularly weird example involved Tom Hiddleston, best known as The Mighty Thor's trickster sibling Loki in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, interacting with a Loki roleplay account.
 * Character Blog: There's a sizeable roleplay community present on Twitter - look for the telltale "[RP]" or "role-played" somewhere in their profile. Some companies have also made similar accounts for characters that they own as well. You can see a list of some of them here.
 * Colbert Bump: A big part of why Twitter is so popular has to do with celebrities having taken to it so enthusiastically. And unlike most trendy things celebrities do, there's a (semi-)practical benefit to ordinary people following suit: People can now address their tweets directly to them, and supposedly even get their attention this way.
 * The Dev Team Thinks of Everything: Back when Twitter had a 140 character limit, if you tried to make a tweet with more characters and click at the nick of time, it would read "Your tweet was over 140 characters. You'll have to be more clever".
 * Did Not Do the Bloody Research: Twitter amused more than a few Brits when it was launched, with "twit" being a very mild term for "idiot". Downplayed due to not being a particularly offensive example, as well as the fact that "Twit" is also equally known as a mild form of "idiot" or "ditz" in the States. "Twitter" also means (or at least meant) to rabbit on inanely without really engaging a brain (i.e., "What are you twittering on about now?"), whether yours or someone else's.
 * Discredited Meme: Twitter was once reputed to be a "graveyard" site for older memes.
 * Exactly What It Says on the Tin: There's no shortage of gimmick accounts that describe exactly what they post, no matter how specific - for example, this account is dedicated to posting a specific panel from the Tintin comics every Wednesday.
 * Fan Girl: Practically a given.
 * For several weeks on end in early 2011, the list of Twitter's trending topics almost always included Justin Bieber - at least until Twitter supposedly banned his name from trending, and his fans made "let Bieber trend" a trend instead. When they were no longer able to do that, they resorted to trends like "Bustin Jieber". Still, Justin Bieber-related topics trended almost every day for a while, and in 2012 they were joined by topics about British-Irish boy band One Direction.
 * The Jonas Brothers, Ariana Grande, Selena Gomez, Demi Lovato, Miley Cyrus, Britney Spears, Katy Perry and Lady Gaga get plenty of trends, too.
 * Food Porn: A common subject of tweets in Twitter's early days.
 * Forced Meme: It's also not uncommon for people to try and brute-force their way into the trending tab.
 * In 2011, WWE caught onto the whole idea that social networking could actually be a good thing to raise the profile of their company. They responded by promoting the hell out of Twitter on their shows and trying to turn everything into a Trending Topic, arguably to the detriment of their actual product. This reached its logical conclusion in December 2011, a "Trending Topic Match" where the winner was not the first wrestler to score a pinfall or submission, but the first wrestler to trend on Twitter.
 * Going Mobile: Twitter has an app for mobile users, so users can tweet on the go.
 * A Good Name for a Rock Band: My New Band is a feed of such suggested names, thought it's been inactive since 2014.
 * Hostile Show Takeover: Some brands and media with Twitter accounts occasionally use this as a form of promotion or else as entertainment. Examples include:
 * In April 2012, the Drowtales Twitter feed was taken over by Kiel.
 * Spamton G. Spamton hijacked the FanGamer Twitter account as part of a merch promotion-slash-Augmented Reality Game in September 2022.
 * I Am Spartacus: After Paul Chambers lost his appeal against his conviction for tweeting a joke about blowing up Robin Hood airport (known as the "Twitter joke trial"), people began retweeting the original message en masse with this attached as a hashtag.
 * Kindhearted Cat Lover: Twitter is home to many such accounts, ranging from mundane-but-popular account Jorts the Cat to figures like Versailles member and visual kei metal musician Hizaki.
 * Little-Known Facts:
 * The Daily Show and The Colbert Report have used Twitter hashtags to make fun of dubious statements by political figures that evoked this trope - such statements include Senator Jon Kyl stating that his claim that abortions constitutes well over 90% of what Planned Parenthood does was "not intended to be a factual statement", Sarah Palin getting Paul Revere's story wrong, and Herman Cain's particularly infamous statement: "I don’t have facts to back this up, but I happen to believe that these demonstrations are planned and orchestrated to distract from the failed policies of the Obama administration".
 * In 2011, local elections in Italy featured two main contenders for the role of mayor in Milan (the second most important city in the country): incumbent centre-right mayor Letizia Moratti (heavily sponsored by Berlusconi) and centre-left candidate Giuliano Pisapia. In a public TV confrontation, Moratti accused Pisapia of being a car thief, a communist and on friendly terms with left-wing extremists, hoping to scare people into not voting for him. Instead, it gave birth to "Pisapia facts": people on Twitter as well as Facebook and various other websites started churning out incredibly exaggerated accusations against Pisapia, with the implicit assumption that they could have been told by Moratti. At the end of the campaign, people were laughing so much that nobody was able to consider Moratti seriously anymore, resulting in her defeat.
 * Live but Delayed: As with most social media, this trope and Twitter don't mix well for those looking to not be spoiled while viewing live airings of their favorite shows.
 * New Media Are Evil:
 * Subverted to hell and back by old media's reaction to Twitter. They are crazy for it, and pretty much every old-media organization had set up multiple Twitter accounts (plus dozens of individual personal accounts for employees) before it even really caught on. See also Small Reference Pools, below.
 * Played straighter by some younger media -- for example, read the hilariously hypocritical message board rants against it. Boo, any interpersonal e-communication that isn't e-mail... wait...
 * News Travels Fast: More than possible through the power of social media dynamics.
 * Not Helping Your Case: Truth in Television here, since it's social media - a phrase for this trope particular to Twitter and some other sites is "posting through it", used when someone doubles down repeatedly on a statement that is seen as offensive, dubious and/or outright incorrect. Said effect tends to snowball harder when notable figures or celebrities of any kind engage in it.
 * Oh Crap, There Are Fanfics of Us: All but inevitable with the presence of creatives on the site.
 * Old Media Playing Catch Up: Particularly, catching up with Twitter's ability to ignite Internet Counterattacks.
 * Only in Florida: The Florida Man account popularized this trope. It was created by Freddie Campion and ran from 2013 until he retired the account in 2019 in the face of growing unease regarding its effects on local news reporting and the moral implications that it carried; this 2019 news story in the Washington Post explores the Twitter account and its role in the larger phenomenon.
 * The Password Is Always Swordfish: Poor opsec of this sort has no doubt resulted in a few 'hacked' Twitter feeds.
 * In 2020, a Dutch "hacker" (the term should be used loosely here) named Victor Gevers was able to break into Donald Trump's Twitter account by guessing that the password was... "MAGA2020", Trump's campaign slogan. (By Gevers' own admission, it took only five guesses.) Adding insult to injury, Gevers claims this was the second time he hacked Trump's account, the first being six years ago where he guessed it was "yourfired" - as in, Trump's Catch Phrase from The Apprentice.
 * Please Select New City Hashtag: Sometimes hashtags collide. For instance, #btv had been used primarily for discussions pertaining to Burlington, Vermont (from the city's airport code), until a massive influx of Arabic-language posts in early 2011 referring to Bahrain Television, after which the Burlington folks switched to #bvt.
 * Propaganda Machine: Near the end of March 2021, Amazon was caught out running an astroturf campaign using bot accounts to try and derail the momentum of a still-growing employee unionization movement. While their role in anti-union efforts against their workers were well-known by this point, this particular attempt was blatantly obvious - the linked thread details numerous examples (such as one "user" taking their avatar from a quickly-Googled band promo). The attempt was so counter-productive that some users took to altering their display names and/or Twitter bios to look vaguely similar to the bots while calling Amazon out.
 * Screw Politeness, I'm a Senior!:
 * Though not to the extent of Facebook Meta, you'll find a lot of older users can be surprisingly foul-mouthed and vicious.
 * In terms of gimmick accounts, there's "Shit My Dad Says", a feed started in August 2009 by then-employed comedy writer Justin Halpern consisting of quotes from his father Sam that took off enough to earn mentions by The Daily Show and actress Kristen Bell, and eventually led to a book deal and even a television series.
 * Sitcom Arch Nemesis: Kevin Smith and Neil Gaiman played this up in their interactions on Twitter - they're real-life friends and fans of each other's work.
 * Small Reference Pools:
 * The BBC in particular is obsessed to an indescribable degree with Twitter. Any news that can possibly be related to anything to do with technology or society in general, never mind the Internet, is determinedly dragged around by its news interviewers to the subject of Twitter, often leading to the more net-savvy interviewees becoming bewildered.
 * CNN had a Twitter problem to the point that the The Daily Show had taken to mocking them for it.
 * Twitter users riff on this often, with one particular refrain for this trope stemming from this viral tweet by user @afraidofwasps.

"My "Not involved in human trafficking" T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt."
 * Streisand Effect:
 * Countless public gaffes or other faux pas end up gaining way more attention due to this trope, to the point that the informal term for such occurrences is "becoming the main character" as coined by maplecocaine - one "goal" of using Twitter is to never double down on something so hard that you become the daily spectacle for a significant portion of the userbase.
 * Strongly Worded Letter: The strong presence of politicians, corporations and other high-profile figures on Twitter naturally lends itself to vitriol directed at them by various other users - including examples of this trope all across its spectrum. The most benign instances that actually fit this trope may be from misguided strangers who at best don't recognize that some folks aren't easily cowed by aggressive tweets (as opposed to people who simply do not care in the slightest); meanwhile, the worse examples tend to come from people severely overestimating their social media influence and/or the capability to enact change through social media, both of which are already subject to less-than-accurate portrayals.
 * And Then What?: This isn't to say that it's impossible for tweet campaigns to take off - but one of the bigger, common elephants in the room is the lack of planning around what should be done once you have enough Twitter attention on your desired cause, as some folks tend to have no conception beyond some vague "awareness". Luke McKinney touches on some parts of this phenomenon in his Cracked.com article, "6 Objective Reasons The US Army Should Invade BP".
 * Suspiciously Specific Denial: The core of this tweet by actor Mike Ginn from 2013 - it's since undergone Memetic Mutation and become a format for invoking this trope with any subject, using a weirdly specific summary statement of your choosing.

"OP: It seems like Twitter-style hashtags have replaced HTML-style coding as Internet shorthand for meta-commentary. Reply:"
 * The New Rock and Roll: As with much of then-new social media, particularly near the turn of the decade into The New Tens.
 * The Tetris Effect: In addition to hashtags being nigh-synonymous with Twitter itself, the practice of "@-replies" has spread to other blog comments and forums. From Cheezburger Network's "Failbooking":

""Attention Toonami Faithful: We heard you. On 05.26.12 #ToonamisBackBitches""
 * This Is for Emphasis, Bitch: Adult Swim's official Twitter announcement for the return of Toonami (itself the result of a successful Twitter campaign) was #ToonamisBackBitches.

"We've created something that will affect your children's children. Can YOU say the same about YOUR life? #nailedit #bpcares"
 * Undermined by Reality: Another trope considered near-ubiquitous on social media, and especially prevalent with the amount of celebrity and brand presence compared to your  Facebook Metas and other Friending Networks. This has the effect of ensuring that word about whatever undermining act occurred spreads alarmingly fast - combine that with "average" internet vitriol and tendencies to double down and you have a recipe for utter disaster.
 * Unlimited Wardrobe: As Imogen Heap demonstrated via ELD display at the 2010 Grammy Awards, you can in fact wear tweets with your dress.
 * Verbal Tic:
 * The "Bweaking NuwuS" account is essentially a mirror of the automated Twitter account run by The BBC, but filtered through Furry Fandom-style "uwu speak" to add comedic effect.
 * Vox Pops: Twitter is a natural source of these.
 * We Care:
 * Parodied by a fake BP Twitter in the wake of the 2011 oil spill catastrophe - the account signed off most of its tweets with #bpcares.

Comic Books

 * In Birds of Prey #1 (2010 series), the World War II time traveler Lady Blackhawk doesn't get a reference to "Putting the Band Back Together", but has been in the present long enough to understand what Twitter is.

Fan Works
"Vegeta: Really should have told Frieza to keep off the Twitter."
 * Dragon Ball Z Abridged:
 * Dodoria's reveal that Frieza was the one who destroyed Planet Vegeta and killed off most of the Saiyans doesn't have the desired impact on Vegeta - turns out posting "lol blewed up filthy monkey planet" on SpaceTwitter doesn't leave a lot of room for questions.


 * 'Regular' Twitter also exists: when Cell makes his terrifying grand announcement of the Cell Games that will determine the fate of the universe, he helpfully mentions a Twitter hashtag to accompany the event.

"Perfect Cell: Be part of the conversation on Twitter at #CellGames! Yamcha: (looking at his phone) Annnnnd he's already trending."

Literature

 * In the YA book The Unidentified by Rae Mariz that was published in 2010, Twitter has replaced texting as the main form of communication.

New Media

 * Play By Post Game Celestial Refresh has Flitter.

Video Games

 * Grand Theft Auto:
 * Grand Theft Auto: The Ballad of Gay Tony introduces Bland-Name Product Bleeter, which figures in at least a couple of scenes; one character "bleets" as he is being murdered, and another mission involves chasing a guy across town while deciphering clues from his asinine posts.
 * Bleeter returns as a product in Grand Theft Auto V alongside other similar parodies like LifeInvader.
 * Tropico 4 Expansion Pack "Modern Times" adds social media and many other modern features to the otherwise 1950s setting - among other things, you can ban the use of Twitter and Facebook by presidential edict. Amusingly enough, this also prevents you from using the PC version's connectivity to Twitter and other social media until the edict is lifted.

Web Comics

 * Homestuck: One of the many glimpses of the world outside of the main characters' lives includes looks at a website called "Serious Business", clearly intended to be Twitter in all but name.
 * Scott Kurtz Web Comic PvP has Captain Amazing, an older character of Scott's, reluctantly adopt a Moe Anthropomorph of Twitter named ReTweet as a sidekick.

Web Original

 * For April Fools' Day 2010, the TYPE-MOON website added hilarious and very in-character TMitter feeds from their most popular characters to the site, which was retained for April Fools' events in the following years.