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 Mduduzi Mathuthu, Chronicle Editor

ONCE described by Lev Grossman of Time magazine as the “cocaine of blogging… but refined into crack”, Twitter celebrated 10 years yesterday.

It has certainly been a slow burner in Zimbabwe, where some notable personalities – like President Robert Mugabe’s press secretary George Charamba – have sworn off it.

But some who once did, among their number the Minister of Higher & Tertiary Education, Science & Technology Development Professor Jonathan Moyo, now partake of this opium as though they never viewed it with suspicion.

Prof Moyo’s U-turn, for instance, was couched in professional excuses. President Mugabe, he said, had appointed him the Zanu-PF secretary for science and technology in the politburo which required him – whether he liked it or not – to sign up, not only to Twitter but Facebook as well.

“The bottom line that you can ignore to your own peril is that social media have become so ubiquitous and so pervasive that it is no longer possible to be relevant in any human endeavour without using them,” he noted on February 9, 2015, the day he joined Twitter.

He added: “Those who don’t use social media in one way or another and those who want to ban their use are doomed.

And so it is that while I still strongly believe in the epistemological proposition that nothing beats human speech as an expression of rational communication, I have decided to not only follow social media but to also for the first time participate in them as an active contributor.”

Whatever his reasons, Prof Moyo (@profjnmoyo) – who notched 55,000 followers in the first year, placing him third in the follower count after Big Brother star Pokello Nare (@pokello_sexxy 178,000) and Econet founder Strive Masiyiwa (@strivemasiyiwa 61,000) – has done more than anyone to bring Twitter to the attention of Zimbabweans.

His numbers are all the more remarkable given that Pokello – who enjoys Africa-wide fame following her stint on the hit reality TV show – joined in February 2012 and Masiyiwa also had a three-year head-start after joining in January 2012.

While Zimbabwe lags behind, itself not much of a surprise given the slow pace of internet connectivity, the rest of the world – at least 320 million of them – were celebrating Twitter’s 10th anniversary yesterday for the cultural and political phenomenon that it has become.

Zimbabwe’s southern neighbour South Africa has an estimated six million users, Kenya 2,1 million and Nigeria 2 million. There are no available statistics on Zimbabwe, but even the most positive estimates don’t put it past a quarter of a million users.

Twitter, which is headquartered in San Francisco, United States, marked the day with a tweet squeezed into 140-characters. It said: “Starting in Australia and New Zealand on 3/21 and moving across the world, we thank you for 10 incredible years. Love, Twitter #LoveTwitter https://t.co/pH4WWdgK6q.”

It the decade gone, Twitter has been captured by journalists, politicians, celebrities, brands and news organisations – its biggest content creators – in the hope that it will drive viewers and readers back to

their causes. They need Twitter, and Twitter needs them.

While the biggest internet community of Zimbabweans is to be found on Facebook, hardened Twitter users almost loathe Facebook with its limitations. They see it more as a picture board closed to the public except family and friends. In that sense, Facebook is the inverse of Twitter. It’s private while Twitter is, by default, public.

“I want my best thoughts to be public,” says Lance Ulanoff, of the tech website, Mashable.

He explained: “When I was in high school, I discovered that a well-timed quip or joke in the classroom could make an entire class – even the teacher – laugh or at least react.

It was a kind of skill, the ability to think on my feet and the distance from my brain to my mouth being maybe a millisecond shorter than those around me.

“It would be 25 years before I connected this relatively minor skill with the perfect digital platform: Twitter.”

What has proved a barrier to Facebook-types joining Twitter, some have opined, is the 140-character limit for a single tweet. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey calls the limit “a beautiful constraint” and says Twitter “will never lose that feeling.”

While it’s arguably one of the factors behind Twitter’s stagnating growth at 320 million users worldwide, compared to Facebook’s surging 1,6 billion, Twitter has carved a niche as a go-to social media platform for the enlightened and those who can’t wait for tomorrow to know. For journalists, it has become an indispensable tool with its ability to turn all users into sources of information from the remotest parts of the world when a major story breaks.

Twitter’s short format is also a democratising one – we all have the same number of characters to make our points. If you took on Noam Chomsky, one of the world’s greatest thinkers in a debate, he would be forced to home in on exactly what needs to be said – in 140 characters.

Yet Twitter’s character limit is not the only attraction. For those who manage information for others – from the Pope through Jacob Zuma ‘I’ve no recollection of Mentor’ to Barack Obama, Twitter has become a useful platform to counter criticisms and falsities as they are churned out by the 24-hour news media in all its forms. Once a lie is put out, and stays uncorrected long enough – and 24 hours is a lifetime in the Twitter age – people start to believe it’s true.

It was indisputable a decade ago, but the world’s news media no longer breaks news: Twitter does. From President Mugabe’s Cabinet reshuffles to just about any other major story, certainly over the last two years, Zimbabweans heard it first on Twitter.

Some of Zimbabwe’s top hacks like NewsDay deputy editor Nqaba Matshazi (@nqabamatshazi), Ziana’s Clarkson Mambo (@cemambo), Reuters’ Nelson Banya (@nelsonbanya), Ranga Mberi (@rangamberi), H-Metro editor Lawrence Moyo (@larry_Moyo) and Zimpapers’ Delta Ndou (@deltandou) have done their fair bit to stay on top of the major stories, while shining light on what the media will not tell you – the story inside the story. It’s a risky business, as employers have a view on things, but Zimbabwean journalists – even those whose Twitter experience does not go beyond retweeting a link to a news story from their paper – generally have freedom to take ownership of the big stories. There is something to be gained for themselves (retweets and followers), and their news organisations (credibility and readers).

Companies like Econet (@econet_support) and Telecel have also found Twitter useful in dealing with customer complaints. The quickest way of getting a response to your complaint or query, certainly in the case of Econet, is not to call their call centre but tagging them on Twitter.

Yet there’s also a dark side to Twitter, which has been a subject of much debate which is not limited to Zimbabwe: character assassinations and sitting in judgment without all the facts.

An American woman, Rachel Dolezal, 38, was widely shamed on Twitter and throughout social media when it was reported that she was misrepresenting her race by claiming to be black when she is white, a claim she has denied.

In the span of a few minutes, she saw her relationship with Twitter abruptly change.

She told the New York Times yesterday: “Twitter is as good as the people who use it. I see Twitter as a neutral tool, not inherently good or bad itself. It can be used to carry empowering or destructive messages. Twitter isn’t going to be good to us; it’s up to us to bring a larger dose of humanity back to Twitter.”

It was a point Prof Moyo – who ironically faces accusations from some within his Zanu-PF party of hurling unrestrained invectives against comrades on Twitter – made when he joined Twitter, noting: “Like everyone else, I think social media are really cool as digital platforms and I acknowledge their amazing power in facilitating interactive communication beyond the boundaries of space and time and in ways that can improve lives and livelihoods.

“But of course every cool thing has its limits and that is particularly true of technological products.

In any event, there are some fundamental questions whose answers still remain elusive about the space and use of social media in human civilisation.

“The abuse of social media witnessed in fake revolutions such as the so-called Arab spring coupled with the vulnerabilities of these media to cybercrime should give society enough reasons to be inquisitive about the virtues of social media.”

It’s a point which was brought home only recently when Tafadzwa Mushunje, a 24-year-old Harare model, was at the end of a volley of people rushing to instant, cold judgment after she was accused – in court – of injecting her lover’s two-year-old son with her “HIV-infected blood”. People who, like me, had only known her name for seconds sat in judgment and passed sentence.

When it was revealed, following court-ordered tests, that she and the child were in fact HIV negative and the abuse had never taken place, it was impossible to take back the sentence Twitter had dished out. She had been hung on the nearest pole.

But as Dolezal so eloquently noted, Twitter is as good as the people who use it. The platform itself is blameless, affording humanity an opportunity to come together to entertain, inform and hopefully solve some of the most difficult questions facing our generation.

Mduduzi Mathuthu is The Chronicle Editor