Opinion | The 25 Tweets That Show How Twitter Changed the World - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/02/10/opinion/twitter-all-time-tweets.html
On Wednesday, Twitter announced that users who pay extra will be able to send their thoughts into the world in tweets of up to 4,000 characters, instead of 280 or less. A few hours later, the site glitched. Users couldn’t tweet; they couldn’t DM; #TwitterDown began trending. All of it — the muddled sense of identity, the breakdown of basic function — confirmed the sense that Twitter, a site that has hosted the global conversation for almost two decades, had become a rickety shell of itself, that its best days were behind it and that it would never be as significant again.
But what, exactly, is being lost? We wanted to capture the ways that Twitter — a platform used by a tiny percentage of the world’s population — changed how we protest, consume news, joke and, of course, argue. So we set ourselves to the task of sorting through the trillions of tweets sent since 2006 to determine which were just noise and which deserved a place in the history books. And then we asked: Could we maybe even … rank them?
What you see below is our list, compiled with the help of experts, of the 25 most important tweets. Like all such rankings, we hope it can serve as a starting point for discussions and arguments, both on Twitter and off. What was ranked too high? Too low? What did we leave off?
Yes, we know: There’s something a little absurd about this exercise. Twitter contains such a wide range of humanity: How do you rank the tweet that got Justine Sacco canceled against the tweet that ignited #MeToo?
And yet this list tells a bigger story about how 17 years of messy, vibrant, sometimes ugly, always lively conversation has shaped the world. Just where did “Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” land compared with “If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet”? You’ll have to scroll to find out.
How We Did It: To compile this ranking, Times Opinion rounded up a group of panelists with widely varied backgrounds but one thing in common: They know a lot about Twitter. (The full list of panelists is at the bottom of the article.) We asked them to submit tweets they thought were good candidates for the most important of all time, with the only criterion being that the tweets had to be in English. We used these to create a list, then sent that list back out to our panelists with instructions to rank the tweets in order of importance and to share their insights about them: why they thought a tweet was important or why it wasn’t. We then crunched the numbers and compiled their insights, edited for content and clarity, into the list you see here.