Twitter: My new favorite social media platform
nature of the platform), hence becoming “Currently walking 20 kilometers.” Lastly, Twitter also had a more “global” feel to it. Whereas only a handful of international celebrities and icons had official FB accounts, on Twitter, many of these folks had verified accounts, allowing us ordinary followers at least even a brief glimpse into their lives, their thoughts.
For a second there, I actually thought Twitter was set to be the next big social media platform, destined to dethrone Facebook the same way the latter had dethroned Friendster only a few years before. Fast forward to today, however, and a good number of those same college classmates who goaded me in the first place haven’t tweeted anything in years.
During my first go-around on the site, I followed the more publicized profiles—my favorite actors, musical artists, authors, film directors, other celebrities. I soon started following more entrepreneurial accounts when I went through this brief phase obsessing over Shark Tank (@ABCSharkTank). And then, when the somewhat tempestuous year that was 2016 hit, I realized I was more of a socialist than a social climber, so I started searching for the Twitter accounts of those personalities and entities who could think “outside the current narrative,” so to speak. Just a few examples: journalist Naomi Klein (@NaomiAKlein), politician Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders), novelist Glenn Diaz (@ GlennnDiaz), and nonprofit org Oxfam (@Oxfam). (Side note: Honestly sucks, though, that Arundhati Roy and Noam Chomsky don’t have their own verified Twitter accounts.)
I’ve since deemed Twitter a valuable wellspring of insight and information—rich with tidbits of knowledge and precisely threshed-out opinions that I otherwise wouldn’t have discovered had I still needed to sift through the clutter of FB’s newsfeed. I’ve encountered tweets and commentaries that offer an alternative, more hopeful, but ever-vigilant view on topics my petit bourgeois upbringing tends to hastily conclude as “good” or “progressive” without first considering various, often marginalized and silenced angles.
Incidentally, I’ve also found Twitter to be less addictive than FB, and therefore not as timeconsuming. There’s only so much fun you can have when the majority of accounts you follow aren’t those of people you personally know. Twitter also tends to be a notably less toxic (more agreeable) venue for political discourse, and thus it feels like a safer, less disheartening place.
In the seven years since I first joined, Twitter—the underdog of the Philippine social media scene—surprisingly feels like my personal antidote for all the noise of the world. And I’m glad I’m more active on it now than I’ve ever been.