This Twitter documentary proves that it was broken from the start

If you want a lesson how quickly the world has changed, take a look at Twitter. The Social Media platform has relieved uprisings, redesigned elections and changed our relationship with celebrities -all since it was founded in 2006.

Twitter: break the bird Tracks the story of Twitter from the start to his acquisition of Elon Musk in 2022. This happens through archive material and interviews with the insiders of the company, especially two of his four founders: Evan Williams and Biz Stone.

As in the past 20 years, it’s almost striker. Kim Kardashian and Ellen Degeneres’ early status updates to see that pre-twitter could only communicate through middlemen-and the rest of us did not expect our opinions at all. The rise of Twitter was also that of the banal. Or, as Katy Perry said memorable: “It’s like” Hello, I do a sock “and I have four hundred thousand people who read this.”

For twenty years on Twitter’s employees, mainly white men in middle-aged glasses seem to be in glasses and beards-man differs from the masses by coloring its castles pink and they are open about the origins of their company. Although many people wondered whether a website that offered status updates and nothing was “the stupidest thing that ever existed, it didn’t take long for them to ask the headlines from newspapers:“ What “Twittering ‘?”.

It didn’t take long for the inconvenience to be received. In 2007, a woman named Ariel Waldman was sent abusive messages via the platform. She tells us when she turned to the founder Jack Dorsey, was his answer: “We checked the matter and decided that it is not in our best interest to get involved.” Twitter then hired a woman, del Harvey, as head of trust and security, who compares the website with a perfectly technical kitten in the documentation that does not have to be fed and never becomes old or sick. “And you look at the kitten and you are how, why can this kitten ball be shooting balls?”

Like many of the contributors, Harvey still seems to suffer from emotional whirlpool that everything happened like this – and at such a speed. Even when the website groaned and interrupted at the volume of its users – remember the “error whale”? – A room full of people in San Francisco patched a system that was never designed for explosive growth and did not convert the communication volume into income.

Managers were hired and fired; Twitter was rebuilt, it grew, it stagnated. And all the time, his team pointed out whether what the users have tweeted or not should moderate or not. Whether Twitter would allow total freedom of speech were a question that was first asked at the foundation of the website. It grew alongside Twitter’s user base. When Trump tweeted that the US election 2020 had been manipulated, this question did not seem closer to be answered.

Dorsey rejected it to be interviewed, and his absence makes a hole in an otherwise fascinating (and depressing) documentary, despite the use of extensive film material and interviews with those who knew him well. Surprisingly, the little time of the Musk takeover and Twitter’s rebranding is devoted to nothing, and nothing is mentioned about the latest edition of Twitter: the exodus of its tired users on other platforms such as Instagram, Bluesky and Tikkok.

What becomes clear is that this is not the story of a fallen utopia, a world of freedom of speech that was ruined by a handful of rogue users. This documentary illuminates the failure of the founders of Twitter, to understand human nature, and the way indifference was embedded in both his system and the guideline philosophy of both the vulnerability and the scary power of the users of the website.

Perhaps so little of the documentary was dedicated to the transition of the platform to X. It was not that Twitter cut off his wings. This bird was broken from the start.

”Twitter: Breaking the Bird ‘is available on BBC IPlayer