Journalist says Twitter shaped his work despite X rebrand

Twitter marked 20 years since its public launch on July 15, 2006, as one journalist argued that the platform’s old identity still defines how many users understand it. Writing for Al Jazeera, Ali Hashem said he continues to call the service Twitter despite its 2023 renaming to X under Elon Musk.

Hashem described Twitter as a tool that changed both his reporting habits and his career. He said early web services had offered ways to publish, but lacked the active public arena that later social platforms created.

Hashem wrote that MySpace offered one early opening and Facebook brought more momentum before Twitter arrived. He recalled a BBC colleague describing the service as a personal breaking-news platform where users could set their own agenda.

A platform for fast-moving news

Hashem said the 2009 Green Revolution in Iran was the first major moment that showed him Twitter’s power. In his account, the platform helped shape public discussion in ways that differed from traditional media coverage.

He placed that shift in a broader line of citizen journalism, citing Salam Pax, the Iraqi blogger who became known for writing during the US-led invasion of Iraq. Hashem said Twitter helped multiply that model, giving many more people a way to publish their own accounts.

His early posts ranged across major events, including an earthquake in Japan, an election in Lebanon and an explosion in Somalia, according to his essay. He said the Arab Spring later became the period that shaped his own presence on the platform as he reported from the region and gained followers.

During the Libyan uprising in March 2011, Hashem said he was based in Sallum, on the Egyptian side of the Libyan border, without his own internet connection. He said he relayed updates by Thuraya satellite phone to a colleague in Cairo, who posted them to his account until Hashem later gained access to a satellite dish.

From reporting tool to public archive

Hashem said reporting trips to Libya, Egypt, Syria and Somalia made Twitter part of his work as an international journalist. He also credited the platform with helping him build a parallel path writing for outlets including Al-Monitor and The Sunday Times.

After becoming bureau chief in Tehran in 2013, Hashem said Twitter became more useful as his expertise on Iran grew. He wrote that he used the platform to report developments from Iran’s nuclear talks with world powers, sometimes publishing in Arabic and English within minutes of each other.

He also described using Twitter during coverage of the war against ISIL, also known as ISIS. Hashem said that after a US air strike near Baghdad airport in January 2020, his sources told him Qassem Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis were in the targeted convoy, and that he was among the first to report it.

Hashem wrote that the platform also carried personal history. He used it to tell the story of a great-grandfather who went to World War I and did not return, and said Al Jazeera colleagues in northern Palestine searched on his behalf for his family’s village and a damaged cemetery.

Twitter later became part of his academic work, Hashem said, through a master’s thesis on Twiplomacy focused on Iran’s nuclear diplomacy. He argued that a service associated with jokes and gossip had changed how states and diplomats communicated.

Hashem said Musk’s decision in 2023 to rename Twitter as X and replace the blue bird logo prompted him to post: “Someone buy Twitter and save the bird.” He wrote that the bird disappeared, but that in Arabic and English, he still uses the name Twitter.

This story draws on original reporting from Al Jazeera.