Why one X user is microblogging history in real time

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Megan McCarty Carino (1:05)

Social media doesn't have to rot our brains. It could also teach us history. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty Carrino.

Content creator Manny Marotta has gone viral in recent weeks for his ex-feed recounting the news of 25 years ago as if it's happening now.

His minute-by-minute account of the events of September, 2001 attracted hundreds of thousands of new followers. And the 27-year-old is also tweeting day-by-day accounts from 50 and 100 years ago as well. Manny Marotta tells us it's become a time-consuming hobby alongside his job as a law clerk for a nonprofit.

Manny Marotta (1:57)

I've been pleasantly surprised by the amount of attention and popularity that it's gotten, especially from elder millennials and people who do feel nostalgic about that era. And so I want to bring to them both a sense of remembrance and a sense of remembrance for people who are Gen Z maybe, who don't know about that time and who never lived through it and who now get to experience it as somebody from that era did get to experience it.

Megan McCarty Carino (2:22)

So you're running these three accounts simultaneously. How does this work? Like, how does the mechanics work?

Manny Marotta (2:29)

I do everything manually. I don't believe in scheduling nor automation. So I do my research every morning. When I wake up in the morning, I read the newspapers from 100 years ago and from 50 years ago. And then I go on the way back machine for 25 years ago. And I read news articles from CNN, AP, Reuters, the main wires. And I do about 10, 15, 20 stories each day that sort of highlight the general attitude at the time. We're doing more stories on the aftermath of 9-11. Plus, the Pope's visit to Kazakhstan, the new church opens, general pop culture stories mixed with the aftermath of September 11th at this point.

Megan McCarty Carino (3:05)

So you started these projects back when Twitter was Twitter before X, kind of a different vibe. But what made this platform a fit for what you wanted to do?

Manny Marotta (3:17)

So everybody follows the news in real time on Twitter anyway. And I thought it would be an informative and educational mode of following the news if people were to follow history in the same way.

And so, I appreciate being able to show people historical events in a modern format, because then they're able to follow the latest updates in news as they would any modern news story, but in the past, which they didn't have back then. They had to wait for a website to update or for the television to show what they wanted. Now people get to experience it through social media.

Megan McCarty Carino (3:50)

Yeah, I have to say, you know, with the September 11th coverage that you did, it really sort of emotionally resonated in a way that that day did, in a way that I think even like a documentary or something, you know, visual wouldn't because it really gave the sense of like the drip, drip, drip of all this chaotic news coming like one piece at a time. And over the following days, you know, these strange things happening that were sort of connected. But we didn't have the sense, you know, at the time of like how this all fit together.

Manny Marotta (4:23)

Yes, especially from 846 through 1030, the first plane to the second collapse, I was posting about twice a minute. And people did really get that drip, drip of both accurate and misinformation that was occurring at the time. And so it really put people in the lens of experiencing it in real time, but doing it in a way that they never had before, which is through Twitter slash X.