They helped start Twitter. They didn’t realize what it would become

When tech founders build products, they can’t always know what those tools will eventually become or how people will use them. That sentiment is echoed repeatedly by early Twitter employees in a new CNN documentary series about the social media company called “Twitter: Breaking the Bird.”

Tech founders don’t always know what their products will become or how people will eventually use them. That’s what happened with Twitter, early employees of the company told CNN in a new documentary series called “Twitter: Breaking the Bird.” The original version of Twitter reflected the early internet of the time — and the radical, optimistic vision for what its founders believed the online world could be. But over the subsequent two decades Twitter had to grapple with what it truly meant to give anyone a voice on the internet, including those who would use that voice to spread hate speech or seek power in ways the founders never saw coming. “There was a lot going on. There’s not really time in the day to contemplate the much larger implications of what we’re building,” Twitter founder Evan Williams said in the series, reflecting on Twitter’s early days. Of course, the world now knows what Twitter has become. The company, now called X, is owned by Elon Musk; the world’s richest man has used it to help reelect President Donald Trump and continues to use it to push his own political and social agenda as he seeks to reshape the US government. White supremacists and disinformation peddlers have been welcomed back to the platform, even as some longtime users try to cling to its utility for sharing real-time news and information. And while Twitter long struggled to turn its influence into a profitable business, the company’s value is more questionable now than ever after Musk’s controversial policies alienated advertisers. The “Breaking the Bird” series pulls back the curtain on how the company got here. It chronicles Twitter’s history — from its creation by a group of counter-culture founders and its chaotic leadership struggles to presidents and political candidates learning how to tweet and, ultimately, to Musk’s dramatic $44 billion takeover.