The service launched publicly on July 15, 2006, under the working name "Twttr," built around a text-message architecture that pushed each post out to subscribers as an SMS. That stripped-down system gave way over time to features now core to social media, including the hashtag, added in 2007 to let users group posts by topic.
By 2010 and 2011, the platform had grown into something bigger than a messaging tool: activists organizing during the Arab Spring turned it into a real-time communications backbone, and it soon became the default news channel for presidents and prime ministers worldwide.
Musk's USD 44 billion purchase of the company in 2022 marked a turning point. He moved swiftly to gut the teams responsible for policing content on the platform, rebranded it X the following year, and by 2026 had folded it into his broader SpaceX venture.
Brussels data puts X far ahead of rivals on disinformation
That trajectory has drawn sustained regulatory attention. The EU's External Action Service reported in March 2026 that of roughly 43,000 disinformation incidents it tracked across Europe, 88% traveled through X — dwarfing Telegram's 3% share and Facebook's 2%. The bloc's analysts found politicians, pro-democracy institutions and security agencies bore the brunt of the campaigns, which were largely designed to chip away at public confidence in domestic institutions.
Academic research points to the platform's own architecture as part of the problem. A team led by Bocconi University political scientist Germain Gauthier concluded, in findings published by Nature in February 2026, that X's feed-ranking algorithm actively pushes users toward more polarized, right-leaning views by favoring content from political activists engineered to provoke strong emotional reactions.
Musk's own activity implicated in spreading unrest-related falsehoods
A London School of Economics study released in January 2026 traced a more direct line between the platform's owner and the spread of false content. Examining posts during Britain's summer 2024 riots — sparked by a knife attack that killed three young girls — the researchers found that Musk's own engagement with far-right accounts systematically boosted disinformation into the feeds of millions of users.
The same study documented nationalist accounts posing as legitimate news outlets, a tactic the researchers said was made easier once X scrapped its old verification system in favor of paid blue checkmarks that now confer greater visibility regardless of a source's credibility. Many of those accounts, the LSE team found, were using AI tools to mass-produce xenophobic fake news and profiting from the traffic it generated.
Fallout: government bans, EU probe into Grok
The consequences have begun showing up in policy decisions. England and Wales' Attorney General barred the department from using X for official communications in June 2026, citing the volume of disinformation and hate speech tolerated on the platform.
The European Commission, separately, opened a formal investigation in January 2026 into X's Grok chatbot after the company skipped a legally required risk assessment before rolling the feature out to EU users — a probe now examining Grok's production of pornographic deepfakes, antisemitic material and manipulated political content.
Usage holds steady even as young users' trust erodes
None of this has dented the platform's reach. Analytics firm Resourcera reported in February 2026 that X draws roughly 561 million monthly users worldwide, more than 100 million of them in the United States alone, with the average user logging over 34 minutes a day on the app. Resourcera's report found 60.6% of users rely on X to keep up with breaking news, cementing its status as one of the most-used news apps globally.
But cracks are visible among younger audiences: the Reuters Institute's Digital News Report 2026, published in June, found that trust in X as a news source among 18-to-24-year-olds in the U.S. fell 7 percentage points.
(jh)
Source: PAP