NOTOC 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.
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"Brevity is the soul of wit."
âShakespeare, Hamlet (follow his Twitter here)
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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". By 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.
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, with tropes abounding in abundance as posts and threads circulate about users' favorite works and their attempts to analyze them, for better and for worse, with varying quality and results.
Twitter has a particular reputation 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. There's also a plethora of themed and sometimes-weirdly-specific accounts dedicated to specific subjects, tropes and other happenings; as with fandom discussions, these "gimmick accounts" can also be similarly hit-or-miss.
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.
- 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.
- Bait and Switch: Employed in many a classic viral tweet.
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- 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".
- 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.
- 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 at one early point in 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.
- 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 donât 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".
- 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...
- Oh Crap, There Are Fanfics of Us: All but inevitable.
- Only in Florida: The Florida Man account popularized this trope. It was created by Freddie Campion and ran from 2013 to 2019, when he retired the account in the face of growing unease regarding its effects on local news reporting and the moral implications the entire affair carried; this 2019 news story in the Washington Post explores the Twitter account and its role in the larger phenomenon.
- 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.
- Screw Politeness, I'm a Senior!:
- Though not to the extent of
FacebookMeta, 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.
- Though not to the extent of
- 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.
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Guy who has only seen The Boss Baby, watching his second movie: Getting a lot of 'Boss Baby' vibes from this... |
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- Streisand Effect: Countless examples, to the point that the informal term used for such occurrences is "main character" (coined by maplecocaine) - per that tweet, the "goal" of using Twitter is to never double down on something so hard that you become the userbase's main spectacle for the day.
- The alleged shadowban[1] of 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 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.
- 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 may be from misguided strangers who at best don't recognize that some folks aren't easily cowed by aggressive tweets; 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?: One of the bigger elephants in the room with regards to this trope is the lack of planning around what should be done once you have enough attention on your desired cause, with 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".
- 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";
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OP: It seems like Twitter-style hashtags have replaced HTML-style coding as Internet shorthand for meta-commentary. |
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- 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.
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- 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.
Fan Works
- 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.
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Vegeta: Really should have told Frieza to keep off the Twitter. |
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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.
Web Comics
- Homestuck: One of the many glimpses of the world outside of the main characters' lives includes glimpses of 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 sidekick named ReTweet.
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.
- â making posts invisible in many contexts