Skip NavigationPeople walk by One World Trade, otherwise known as the Freedon Tower, which is located on the land where the Twin Towers once stood before they were destroyed in the attacks on September 11, 2001 on September 09, 2024 in New York City. Spencer Platt | Getty Images
Despite his affinity for history, Manny Marotta found himself uninspired by his college classes back in 2018 until he started tweeting about the subject.
“People were bored, and I was bored. And I was thinking, ‘Well, everyone’s on Twitter right now anyway, I might as well make history engaging by live-tweeting history in some way,’” he says.
He started an account, 100YearsAgoLive, to recount the events of 1918, including the end of World War I. The account is still active and now follows the events of 1926. Marotta uses online news archives to source each day’s news and posts on the 100th anniversary, as if he were there live-tweeting the story.
In 2019, Marotta made another account — 50YearsAgoLive — to cover the Apollo 11 moon landing mission and other happenings from 1969. And in 2022, he launched 25YearsAgoLive, primarily to cover the death of Princess Diana in 1997.
The accounts gradually gained a following as Marotta says users on Twitter — which became X in 2023 — enjoyed discovering or remembering historical events on the social media platform where many of them also learn about breaking news.
The 25YearsAgoLive account’s following grew rapidly at the beginning of 2026 after Marotta shared the news from Feb. 18, 2001 about the death of NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt at the Daytona 500. His posts about Earnhardt made their way to online NASCAR circles and gained the account around 250,000 followers in a day, Marotta says.
On Jan. 1 of this year, 25YearsAgoLive had about 66,000 followers on X, according to screenshots provided by Marotta. By March 1, that number was nearly 318,000.
The approaching 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks brought Marotta’s account hundreds of thousands more followers — and counting. On Sept. 8, 25YearsAgoLive had just over 458,000 followers. By the morning of Sept. 10, the total was 570,000.
A side hustle teaching history on X
Marotta has a premium X account and was previously eligible for the platform’s Creator Revenue Sharing program which paid posters based on the views and engagement their posts receive. Marotta earned nearly $2,300 since June 2024 from X for his posts and an additional $4,725 for promoting an online geography game, GeoHistory, on his account, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.
As of Sept. 7, X sunset that program and replaced it with a new Original Content Rewards program that requires creators to apply and be approved to make money from their posts. Marotta has applied, but is unsure he will be approved due to the platform encouraging and rewarding what it deems “original content.” Though the posts Marotta writes are original, the headlines and photos he uses to accompany them are repurposed from news archives.
While Marotta says he hopes he’s able to monetize his accounts again, he adds that he’s not really in it for the money.
“It gives me such a sense of joy when somebody says that they learn something new about the past, or that they’ve decided to pursue a career or an interest in history as a result of the accounts, which has happened various times,” he says. “I just want people to be more interested in history in general. I feel like it’s overlooked.”
Some users on X have accused Marotta of being “obsessed” with 9/11 or “only” posting about that event, which he strongly rejects. When he started the account several years ago he wasn’t thinking about the upcoming 9/11 anniversary at all, he says. But he has done immense amounts of research preparing to memorialize the day.
Marotta shared an FAQ on Sept. 7 to help followers and other viewers understand why he has more than 400 posts planned for Friday. “I worked very hard to learn the exact minute and if possible, the precise second that events occurred on 9/11, and I will post at those exact moments,” he wrote. “It will be a completely real-time retelling of the day.”
Why young people are so interested in 9/11
Currently 27 years old, Marotta himself was too young to remember Sept. 11, 2001, and many of his followers are in the same boat. Older followers have “a very different relationship with [9/11] than younger people,” he says.
“The older people definitely feel a lot more emotional and personally connected to it. They remember where they were. Many of them knew somebody who was associated with it,” he says. “The younger people treat it as remotely as an event like Pearl Harbor, something that happened in the distant past. And so you see a lot more joking about it, irony, and these two guys are at odds, I think.”
It’s not uncommon, especially for millennial and Gen Z users, to see jokes about 9/11 among conspiracy theories and other far less mournful reactions to the event across social media platforms like X and TikTok.
By posting about history in general and specifically with the 9/11 content he has planned, Marotta wants to help “reconcile those two cultural camps” of people who look back on 9/11 with sorrow and those who make light of the event.
“We [younger people] see our parents have this emotional relationship with the event and know what it was like to be present at such a consequential moment in history,” Marotta says. “We have a sense of having missed something.”
Marotta says he’s not looking to recreate the fear and mass grieving that American adults felt 25 years ago. But he hopes that posting the news updates, as they happened, will help make the day’s events more tangible and dispel some of the conspiracy and apathy among those who didn’t live through them.
“The lack of understanding about the event … people legitimately believe … all these conspiracy theories,” he says. “[I hope] people come away from 9/11 with more knowledge, learning things … people died and it’s a horrible thing, and [I] hope that when they read these stories and see these events, they feel a little bit bad making jokes about it.”
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