“Twitter: Breaking the Bird” gives a compelling account of how “wild-eyed Silicon Valley dreaming” can unfurl into “disturbing, ideological dogma”, said Chris Bennion in The Telegraph.
The “riveting” documentary begins in the “halcyon days” of 2005, when a young “ragtag” gang gathered in a “crummy office” in San Francisco to try their hands at “inventing the future”. Jack Dorsey, who went on to become Twitter’s first CEO, came up with the idea for a site that would allow its users to microblog each other in real time, sharing their thoughts through short messages.
Twitter soon “exploded in popularity”, said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian, but the site was a “piece of rubbish”. The film takes us back to the “fail whale years” when every time the platform crashed (frequently), a whale would pop up on the screen “lifted by many, many little Twitter birds”.
To begin with, Dorsey’s “unwavering belief in free speech” seemed “justified”. Twitter had, after all, been “instrumental” in facilitating the Black Lives Matter movement. But it wasn’t long before hate speech “flooded” in, and Trump’s “vitriolic posts” started to legitimise other dangerous content. As the debate over free speech “raged”, Dorsey resigned (he had already been sacked once before), and sold the platform to Elon Musk, who promptly rebranded the “hellscape”, X.
At times it’s felt as if Musk “paid $44 billion for a mansion, then lit a fire in its basement”, said Carol Midgley in The Times. But this “sprightly” documentary shows how things were “not exactly utopian” even before the tech billionaire took the reins.
A number of former Twitter employees share their recollections of the early years when the platform’s founders were “reluctant to censor abuse”. When Ariel Waldman told Dorsey she was being threatened online by a stalker, the CEO allegedly told her it was “best for us not to get involved” and “wished her luck resolving the problem”.
Dorsey declined to be interviewed for the documentary and his absence leaves a “hole” in an otherwise “fascinating” film, said Marianne Levy in The i Paper. There is also “surprisingly” little time dedicated to Musk or X’s “exodus of its weary users to other platforms”. The message, however, is clear: “it wasn’t that Twitter had its wings clipped; this bird was broken from the start.”