Say what you will about Twitter (renamed to the eye-rollingly silly X name), I quite adore it. I’m not an Elon fangirl, yet I gain such value from having the platform available that I actually subscribe annually, which is not something I do lightly.

Recently, X did something revolutionary. They used their internal AI system (known as Grok) to remove the need for translation. Now, if anyone, anywhere in the world, is tweeting, you just read it in your own language. It is all automatically translated. This is revolutionary!!

It started for me by seeing Japanese people tweeting and sharing pictures and asking questions to Americans about their lives and their food and culture.

Now I’m seeing Portugese and Spanish, and this weekend, lots of Russian people. Watching people talk to each other, from around the world, as if it were the first time. Seeing Russians learn that they aren’t hated just for being Russian, as they’ve always been told. They describe having to go through multiple VPN layers to use Twitter to see the world beyond their state broadcast TV channels that they say are all propaganda.

I saw one tweet where they said how lovely it was to find out they weren’t hated, and really, all we want to see is pictures of each other’s cats 😀

Like any algorithmic driven social media, X learns what you like and react to, so you could just use the tool to rage scroll. But it has powerful filters, so you can make it a beautiful place to be. I mute anything that has the word “Trump” in it, for my own sanity. I block phrases that are common in AI slop and rage baiters, like “Read that one more time.” or “Let that sink in.” because they annoy me and I know the post exists only to try to manipulate me.

With this recent change to remove the need for translation, now you can see (and read) tweets like this:

I never would have read it before, because it is actually written in Russian.

Or this guy from Russia who was greeted by a Texan.

Or this post from someone in Turkey:

I see people reflecting on how we all just want peace and to get along and learn about each other’s cultures and maybe it is really just the people with all the power spreading the hate.

I’m also learning about Japanese meals!

X has been doing other things lately to remove bots, labelling posts created with AI, and removing financial incentives from people who just steal and repost things, or make everything “🚨 Breaking News”. It just keeps getting better and better. Inspiring!