Charlie Sheen's 2011 Two and a Half Men Twitter meltdown paved the way for other celebrity social media breakdowns

The Outline

Sheen, who set a Guinness World Record when he joined Twitter in March 2011 and amassed 1 million followers in 25 hours and 17 minutes, "began writing the blueprint for a new kind of fame, a pioneering form of burning out that has since taken regular boundless flight on Twitter," says John Wilmes. "His 2011 bluster has, ever since, been endemic to the platform, embedded in its personality." A few days after joining Twitter, Sheen was fired from Two and a Half Men amid a spat with co-creator Chuck Lorre. "Celebrity implosions had been manically covered for years, but Sheen’s breakdown came at an inflection point for media, showing how Wow, This Guy Is Actually Nuts would become a defining narrative structure in the years ahead, and how a collapsing protagonist could actively shape the way they were covered. In a few scant years, the rules had changed entirely: Imagine if Britney Spears, who suffered through an indefinitely cruel newscycle following a public breakdown in 2007, had the same media ecosystem, and could have told her story more her own way," says Wilmes.