One word tweet: why posts with a single word are popular on Twitter

In the last few days, more and more highly followed accounts on Twitter they are publishing mysterious one-word tweet, without hashtags or anything else. For example, NASA has published “universe” or universe and US President Joe Biden has opted for “democracy” or democracy. What do these tweets mean? It is a new trend started almost by chance yesterday evening and which is becoming more and more widespread, and which has already crossed the ocean to reach us in Europe too: this is how this works single word game on Twitter.

In the US it was immediately nicknamed one-word tweet or tweet of a single word and going back to the various posts released yesterday evening it seems that everything started from the US railway company Amtrakwhich at 9 pm on September 1 published the word “trains” or trains, all in lowercase, without hashtags or explanations, here is the post:

It is not difficult at this point to deduce the functioning of the one word tweet: you have to choose only one word to describe yourself in the most effective and precise way possible. Just four hours after publication, Amtrack’s single-word tweet was already trending in the US with 14,000 retweets, 85,000 likes and 1,400 comments, while at the time of writing, the values ​​have more than doubled. Soon many other famous accounts jumped on the trend band like the ones already mentioned, as well as The Washington Post which tweeted “news”, or the Marriot Bonvoy which published “hotel”, while the Bart company which deals with trains of San Francisco has claimed jokingly the paternity of the trend recalling a tweet from over two years ago.