My Twitter, not X: Al Jazeera update
Nothing much stays with me from the first days of Twitter, which was publicly launched 20 years ago, on July 15, 2006. I had discovered
Nothing much stays with me from the first days of Twitter, which was publicly launched 20 years ago, on July 15, 2006. I had discovered the internet back in 1995 and early on, I started thinking about how to get my voice heard by the world. I created a couple of websites through Angelfire and 8m, but there was no real ecosystem to nurture the idea. It’s like opening a shop to sell a certain product in a remote area – somewhere nobody really knows, at a time when there’s no interest – compared with opening that same shop in a mall, or on a street full of other vendors. MySpace was another opening, but the idea was not yet ripe. Facebook came with a spark – and then we got Twitter. “It’s like having your own breaking news platform, you’ll set your own agenda,” I remember one of my colleagues at the BBC, where I used to work, saying at the time. It didn’t take me long to sign up. I cannot recall whether I tweeted immediately or not, yet what happened afterwards helped frame my future as an international journalist. Twitter’s first defining moment for me was 2009’s Green Revolution in Iran, when I and others followed how the platform shaped the discourse in a way that differed completely from traditional media. We were not new to citizen journalism; a few years earlier, Salam Pax emerged as the first ever famous war blogger, presenting his distinctive view of the US-led invasion of Iraq through his individual blog.
A few years later, tens of thousands of Salams have appeared – and I’m one of them. Going through my early timeline, I see that I was tweeting randomly – an earthquake in Japan, an election in Lebanon, an explosion in Somalia, and so on. Then came the Arab Spring. Just as with many in the world, this was the moment that shaped my Twitter presence, and as I got involved in the coverage, I became well-positioned to post and attract followers. My coverage of the Libyan revolution in March 2011 introduced me to many people and gave me a better understanding of what was happening. I was based in Sallum, a village on the Egyptian side of the Libyan border, without a connection of my own. I fed a colleague back in Cairo a sentence at a time over a crackling Thuraya satellite phone, and he typed my words into the account that I could not reach. Its password lived on my friend’s head until days later, when I finally got my hands on a satellite dish. Trips to Libya, Egypt, Syria, Somalia – all of it made Twitter part and parcel of my journalistic journey, and it also helped me build a parallel path writing for international outlets including Al-Monitor and The Sunday Times. Yet still, there was something else that changed my direction. Until 2013, I was a journalist covering stories without specialisation – I used to report from Iran, like I do today, yet it was not my career the way it currently is.
The BriefWire