Sam Sanders

Sammy, Gavin, thank you so much.

You have helped me think a lot better about this stuff.

I appreciate you.

We'll include a link to Samantha Cain and Gavin Whedon's book on our show notes page.

It's called Protein, The Making of a Nutritional Superstar.

And every weekend, you can find new episodes of Apple News in Conversation in the Apple News app.

Just tap on the audio tab, those little headphones at the bottom, to find it.

This is In Conversation from Apple News.

I'm Sam Sanders, in for Shumita Basu.

Today, what the transformation of Twitter to X reveals about the future of social media.

On March 21st, 2006, Jack Dorsey, one of the creators of Twitter, sent the first tweet.

Back then, the platform was just a company name and a prototype.

an idea about a new way to communicate online.

Over time, it grew into something much, much bigger, with hundreds of millions of users all across the globe.

And while it was never perfect, many people saw Twitter as an online public square, a place to share and connect with people you'd never met,

In 2022, Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion.

He then cut the staff by about 80%, dismantled many of the platform's content moderation systems, incorporated the AI chatbot Grok into the platform, and got rid of Twitter's name.

That's Ryan Mack.

He's a tech reporter for The New York Times.

He wrote the book Character Limit, How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter, with his colleague at The Times, Kate Conger.