My Twitter, not X | Technology News

Not much has stayed with me since the early days of Twitter, which was launched publicly 20 years ago, on July 15, 2006.

I discovered the internet in 1995 and early on, I started thinking about how to get my voice heard around the world. I created several websites through Angelfire and 8m, but there was no real environment to promote the idea. It’s like opening a store to sell things far away – somewhere no one knows, at a time when there is no interest – compared to opening the same store in the market, or in a street full of other vendors.

MySpace was another launch, but the idea was not mature. Facebook came with the spark – then we got Twitter.

“It’s like having your own news outlet, you do what you want,” I remember one of my colleagues at the BBC, where I worked, saying at the time.

It didn’t take long for me to sign up. I don’t remember if I tweeted it right away or not, but what happened next helped shape my future as an international journalist.

The first notable moment of Twitter for me was the 2009 Green Revolution in Iran, where I and others followed how the platform framed the issue in a very different way than traditional media. We are not new to citizen journalism; A few years earlier, Salam Pax emerged as a well-known war blogger, expressing his unique views on the US-led invasion of Iraq through his blog. A few years later, thousands of Salams appeared – and I am one of them.

When I go through my early days, I find that I write randomly – the earthquake in Japan, the election in Lebanon, the explosion in Somalia, and so on. Then came the Arab Spring. As with many in the world, this was the moment that made my presence on Twitter, and when I participated in the media, I was ready to post and attract followers.

My article about the revolution in Libya in March 2011 brought me to a wider audience and a better understanding of what was going on. I stayed in Sallum, a village on the Egyptian side of the Libyan border, without my connection. I gave my friend in Cairo a sentence at once on Thuraya’s cell phone, and he recorded my words in an account I couldn’t access. His password stayed in my friend’s head until a few days later, when I got a satellite dish.

Trips to Libya, Egypt, Syria, Somalia – all these made Twitter a part of my journalistic journey, and also helped me develop a similar approach to writing for international outlets including Al-Monitor and The Sunday Times.

However, there was another thing that completely changed me. Until 2013, I was a freelance journalist – I used to report from Iran, as I do today, but it was not my job as it is now. But then I became the head of the office in Tehran and my knowledge began to grow – and here, Twitter gave me another layer, expanding my network every day.

Personally, that skill gave the platform the best time for me. I ended the Iran nuclear talks with the world powers before the media organizations finished their first draft, writing in Arabic and English minutes later and announcing the same deal while other newsrooms were still working on their coverage.

The war against ISIL (ISIS) followed, then January 2020 in the morning near the Baghdad airport when my sources told me that the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of the Quds Force, Qassem Soleimani, and the deputy commander of the Iraqi army, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, were in the group that was hit by a US plane and I say that I was in the US military.

Twitter wasn’t the only wire service in other people’s wars. I have “met” world leaders and famous people on the platform – and for a while we felt that we were equal. I’ve made my scoops there, and I’ve made my biggest gaffes there. You act and connect and you see the results immediately, feedback or praise. It’s like a daily magazine, which outshines you. I know many, some friends, some friends, some people I just followed, who left our country while their accounts are still there – for us, and for me – to return to memory or find information.

It was also there, on the 100th anniversary of World War I, that I told the story of my grandfather, Ali Hashem, who went to war and never returned; and my grandfather Hussein, who was three years old when his father was drafted into the Ottoman army and never saw him again.

That’s where Al Jazeera’s colleagues, who are in northern Palestine, went to look for my family’s village in my place, the cemetery that was almost in ruins, the grave of my grandmother who was never found.

It became, later, the subject of my academic work, in turn, a master’s thesis on Twiplomacy, examining how the platform built on gossip and jokes quietly changed the course of racial reform, with the Iran nuclear talks as my subject.

In the summer of 2023 – realizing where things are going, as the new owner Elon Musk decided to change the name of Twitter to X, and unfortunately, if I can, kill the well-known and lovable blue bird that accompanied the journey that many made with the platform, including myself – I wrote five words.

Someone buys Twitter and keeps the bird. Alas, no one did, and the bird disappeared from the picture, and the name went with it, replaced by a single letter that is still wrong in my mouth. In Arabic or in English, the words that come out of me, are still Twitter.