I opened a Twitter account out of curiosity. Then I discovered that a man on Christmas Island was using Twitter to alert people to the arrival of asylum seekers on Christmas Island at a time when our government was being ultra secretive about their dealing with these unfortunates. I immediately became a follower and learnt more than the government was willing to share.
As people may have guessed, I am interested in politics :grin: but in our last election I was feeling quite jaded so I decided to follow the campaign via the political cartoonists, all of whom tweet out links to their latest cartoons. I followed cartoonists from both ends of the political spectrum but have had to unfollow one because his cartoons are just to revolting to look at.
During the last US presidential campaign I started following both Trump and Clinton because Twitter is a new way that candidates get their message to supporters without going through the media filter and it is important to understand this new connection. Only recently have I discovered how to see what comes back to them from anyone with a Twitter account.
If people think that political discussion on this forum gets a little rough at times, they should see what people feel free to post on Twitter. By reading what supporters and detractors tweet one can get a feeling for the general thinking of each politician's political base. It isn't so much like looking through a window into a dark room as lifting up a rock and seeing what crawls beneath.
I don't tweet about myself but occasionally I do offer a response by way of liking a tweet and sometimes I retweet something that I think is important. When I first started retweeting the information from Christmas Island I had just two people following me. They were people who already knew me and were alerted to my activity by Twitter itself. One was my grandson, another a friend from church. Since then I have acquired a number of followers that I do not know personally but who must have noticed something I retweeted and they decided I might be interesting. At the moment I have 14 followers and follow 27 others. This is of no importance to me. I'm there to read, listen and learn and I add people of interest from time to time and drop them once they have nothing new to show me.