Tweeting becomes a weapon

November 18, 2009
The Nation

Twitter proved to be an efficient tool for Barack Obama to win the US presidential elections late last year - he was one of the most popular tweeters with more than 2.6 million followers. However, the fact that Obama did not tweet himself was no surprise - the White House has its own media team that sends out messages to the public. Yet, it is a bit mystifying as to why he didn't personally send out any tweets during the primaries.

That revelation came on Monday at a Q&A session with Chinese youth in Shanghai. The president fielded a question about the restricted use of Twitter in China and he said: "I have never used Twitter, but I'm an advocate of technology and not restricting Internet access."

Now lets enter cyberspace in Thailand, or rather the battlefield it has become with politicians using the Internet to not just speak to their supporters but also to attack their rivals.

Like Obama, micro blogging has failed to impress Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva even though his account, PM_Abhisit, had 33,107 followers as of press time. He is known to have once said that he did not really like the concept of announcing all his actions to the whole world.

Initially though Abhisit did tweet himself, but later he had to hand the job over to his staff.

Yet, unlike Obama and Abhisit, fugitive ex-PM Thaksin Shinawatra seems to love networking in cyberspace. In fact, he has been networking non-stop since just before his 60th birthday in late July via Twitter and Facebook under his "Thaksinlive" account.

According to the red shirts, Thaksinlive is a channel to fill the communication gap between Thaksin and his supporters. Through Twitter, Thaksin can send messages to his supporters across the Kingdom, indeed across the world, and can get direct messages from them as well. In fact, just a short message on his mobile phone can make big news. As of press time, he had 44,289 fellow tweeters following his every move.

However, things in the micro-blogging world seem to have become a bit confusing recently. There's now a copycat account called "taksinlive" with the ex-premier's photo probably set up to confuse the red-shirted tweeters.

Even though taksinlive looks very similar to Thaksin's account, the owner appears to intensely dislike the former PM. The taksinlive account, which was set up in late September and had 646 followers as of press time, carries nasty messages about Thaksin, especially in terms of his latest moves in Cambodia. And this tweeting seems to have woken some people up - just yesterday it had 100 new followers.

Thaksin supporters, however, are warning all their counterparts not to follow "taksinlive" because it is not "Thaksinlive". Hopefully, the red shirts will heed this warning, because we don't want to see bloodshed in the virtual world, do we?

jintana@nationgroup.com