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Nothing much stays with me from the first days of Twitter, which was publicly launched ۲۰ years ago, on July ۱۵, ۲۰۰۶.
I had discovered the internet back in ۱۹۹۵ 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 ۸m, 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 ۲۰۰۹’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 ۲۰۱۱ 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 ۲۰۱۳, 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. But then I became a bureau chief in Tehran and my knowledge began growing – and here, Twitter gave me another layer, widening my network day after day.
Personally, that specialisation gave the platform its finest hour for me. I broke developments out of Iran’s nuclear talks with world powers before the news agencies had finished their first draft, filing in Arabic and English within minutes of each other and announcing the agreement itself while other newsrooms were still working on their bulletins.
The war against ISIL (ISIS) followed, then a January ۲۰۲۰ morning near Baghdad airport when my sources told me the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s Quds Force, Qassem Soleimani, and the deputy chief of Iraq’s Popular Mobilisation Forces, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, were in a convoy hit by a US air strike – and I was among the first to say so.
Twitter was never only a wire service for other people’s wars. I’ve “met” heads of state and celebrities on this platform – and for a moment we felt equals. I have made my scoops there, and I have made my hugest gaffes there, too. You act and you interact and you see the result immediately, backlash or praise. It’s like a daily journal, one that outlives you. I know of many, some friends, some colleagues, some people I only happened to follow, who left our world while their accounts are still there – for us, and for me – to return to for the memory or to get a piece of information.
It was also where, on the ۱۰۰th anniversary of World War I, that I told the story of my great-grandfather, Ali Hashem, who went to the war and never returned; and of my grandfather Hussein, who was three when his father was summoned to the Ottoman army and never saw him again.
It was where colleagues at Al Jazeera, stationed in the north of Palestine, went looking for my family’s village on my behalf, for a cemetery nearly in ruins, for a great-grandmother’s grave that has never been found.
It became, eventually, the subject of my own academic work too, a master’s thesis on Twiplomacy, examining how a platform built for gossip and jokes quietly rewired the choreography of nations, with Iran’s nuclear diplomacy as my case study.
In the summer of ۲۰۲۳ – sensing where things were headed, as new owner Elon Musk decided to change Twitter’s name to X, and to tragically, if I may so, kill the famous and lovely blue bird that accompanied the journey many made with the platform, including myself – I posted five words.
“Someone buy Twitter and save the bird.” Alas, nobody did, and the bird disappeared from the icon, and the name went with it, replaced by a single letter that still sits wrong in my mouth. In Arabic or in English, the word that comes out of me, though, is still Twitter.
