When Jack Dorsey wrote “just set up my twttr” on a new platform he had just developed in March 2006, he did not anticipate how much the world would change and his creation would have at least partial responsibility for some of it. “The Butterfly Effect” had been released only two years prior to the first tweet. I joined twitter in 2009, following the lead of my friend Shahid, who has had a profound influence on my thinking and cultural choices over the years. Pakistan had just gone through a military-civilian power transfer and there was a movement to oust to military dictator in 2007, led by lawyers across the country. The ‘Lawyers Movement’ was when many young Pakistani activists found a safe place in Twitter, to exchange ideas, vent frustrations and share information. Shahid was involved with some aspects of that movement and he made many useful connections at the time. He had also started a blog to collect his writings, on different aspects on Pakistan’s history, debunking some common myths and providing alternate sources of history. I set up a blog too, in 2011, with similar themes.
Some of my initial tweets were in the aftermath of Salman Taseer’s assassination in 2011. He was the governor of Pakistan’s largest province, Punjab, where I was born and raised. He took a stand defending a poor Christian woman (Aasia Bibi) who had been accused of blasphemy and was in jail. He publicly visited the woman, and spoke against the injustice and irrationality of the blasphemy law in Pakistan. He was also one of the first Pakistani politicians to use twitter and use it well. In a religiously oriented state such as Pakistan, that was a bold and eventually fatal step. He was assassinated by his own security guard in January 2011. Salman Taseer was one of the first Pakistani politicians to actively use Twitter and to do it well. I learned about his death from Twitter, through one of Shahid’s tweets. In the small liberal community in Pakistan, this was a big shock. Some activists planned an event called “Rally to restore sanity”— borrowed from a rally organized by Jon Stewart in October 2010 – in Lahore. I went to that “rally” which was basically a group of about a dozen people holding banners against fundamentalism standing at a famous roundabout in the middle of Lahore on a cool Sunday afternoon. I tried to “live-tweet” that event, even though I had very few followers of Twitter at the time. I don’t remember anyone noticing my tweets or the event itself. I found out about a local non-profit called Institute of Peace and Secular Studies (IPSS) through one of the organizers of the rally.
In May 2011, I learned about the raid on Osama Bin Laden’s compound in Abbotabad through Twitter. A software engineer in Abbotabad had accidentally live-tweeted the whole thing as seen from his rooftop. I thought it was a watershed moment in Pakistan’s history with the balance of power moving away from the military establishment. I was wrong.
Later in the year, I wrote about how religious extremism in Pakistan was a long-term problem and that terrorists had successfully used religion to justify their acts, about the difference between secularism and atheism, and some listicles on history and politics. One of my listicles was retweeted and promoted by a famous Pakistani social activist and I gained some traction on Twitter. Around mid-year, I started writing a rebuttal series about Zaid Hamid, a colorful character in Pakistan’s sociopolitical scene (I once named him “Glenn Beck of Pakistan without the drawing board”). Some of that work also got around on Twitter and brought me more followers. My first bog-post for a national newspaper was published that year, a self-satire on life of vegetarians in a predominantly carnivorous Pakistan. That was also the first time I got paid for writing something (about $60). Later I started writing for a now-defunct Pakistani blog-zine called ‘Pak Tea House’ (the original ‘Tea House’ was in Lahore and many prominent writers an intellectuals had frequented it in its heyday). Pak Tea House’s owner, Raza Rumi, became my gateway to getting published in other places including ‘The Friday Times’. Through Twitter, I got introduced to other people who thought outside the norm and it was a relief to connect with them. I first met many like-minded people through the platform, and then met many of those in real-life, which resulted in writing assignments and sometimes just hang-out opportunities. I did not have a smartphone so I would text tweets to a number and many of my tweets were full of typos at the time.
Globally, 2011 was the time of ‘Arab Spring’ and young revolutionaries using social media tools to try and bring regime/societal change.
In early 2012, I sent a DM to Ali Aftab Saeed of Beygairat Brigade to invite him for a potential podcast interview (he offered to do a video-podcast and we worked on that project for months, the fruits of that labor are rotting somewhere in multiple videotapes). It was also then that I was connected to editors of Dawn blogs by Nadeem Farooq Paracha (NFP), a writer I had admired for years and who had written for Dawn for decades. At the time, NFP was one of the more prominent secular writers for Dawn. It was in April 2012 that I saw a tweet from someone that partially changed my life (in hindsisght). It was about a ‘fellowship’ opportunity offered by the Atlantic Council. Atlantic Council, an American non-profit, had started a dedicated South Asia Center and was inviting applications for a program called ‘Emerging Leaders of Pakistan’ (ELP). I had just graduated from medical school and was waiting to start my internship and my heart was not fully in medicine. I applied on a lark. I also applied for a TED fellowship, after communicating with Shermeen Obaid Chinoy on Twitter (she had yet to win any Oscars at that point). Raza Rumi, who ran ‘Pak Tea House’ asked me around this time if I wanted to go to Karachi for a project. I had never been so I said yes.
I started my internship at the beginning of May 2012. The day I started, I was put on overnight call. The next morning, I realized that three of my articles had been published in different newspapers, all of them courtesy of connections that I made on Twitter. I had a Skype interview with the Atlantic Council in May and then an in-person one in June. In the meanwhile, there was an undercurrent of unrest in the young doctors community that I was a part of. Many young doctors had stopped working at the government-run outdoor centers in protest. In the last week of June, things came to a head, young doctors were attacked by Punjab Police and mass arrests were made. Many of my classmates and people I worked with were either in jail or in hiding. I was among the group that was in hiding. I saw how the media and state government were demonizing doctors for protesting and demanding for their rights. I wrote multiple articles that week that were published by two major newspapers, and one of them was referenced in a Foreign Policy magazine article. I was also active on Twitter and Facebook, arguing 24/7 with strangers who thought doctors were just greedy and deserved to be thrown in jail.
After about ten days of stand-off, with government-hospitals without a majority of junior doctors, negotiations between representatives of doctors and the state government were successful and my colleagues were released from jail. During the “off-days”, I got emails from the U.S. State Department that I was invited as a speaker to a social media summit in Karachi in late July. On the day of my flight, I woke up to find an email from Shuja Nawaz, then-director of Atlantic Council’s South Asia Center, congratulating me that I had been selected as one of the fifteen inaugural ELP fellows and would visit the United States for three week in November 2012. I jumped up and down with joy and got ready to go to work. The summit in Karachi was a blast and I met many of the people I had interacted with and admired on Twitter (the guy who live-tweeted the OBL raid was there). One of the main organizers of the event was Sabeen Mahmud, a creative spark and perpetual dreamer in Karachi. Through a twitter DM, I met Khuldune Shahid, who had just started working as the web editor of ‘The Nation’ newspaper. He got me in touch with the op-ed editor and I wrote for them for almost two years.
I continued to Tweet and meet like-minded people till I was in Pakistan (late 2016). Most of my posts were actually links to articles I had written for one publication or another. I would tag people who I knew would be interested in that topic and frequently DMed people with my work as well. Friends moved to different cities or countries and Twitter was one way to keep up with them. It was also a great place to find information and finding good things to read (articles and books). It was a place where I felt safe. It felt familiar and cozy. Thus, I spent more time on and thinking about life on Twitter than real life. It was also an escape from the daily reality of living in Pakistan. In 2014-15 alone, Sabeen was shot to death, and Raza Rumi escaped an assassination attempt. NFP grew older and his articles started appearing in military publications. Khuldune left ‘The Nation’. Political Parties in Pakistan had started influence operations on social media. Military establishment already had an army of bots and trolls harassing anyone who dared to challenge their narrative.
By the time I moved to the U.S. in late 2016, the energy of the 2007-8 ‘revolutionaries’ had dissipated and many big-name accounts were either dormant or involved in other parts of life such as building careers. In January 2017, some Pakistani bloggers were abducted by military intelligence agencies. Their ‘crime’ was to mock and challenge military’s hegemonic role in Pakistan. I knew one of them through social media and because of his work for Dawn Urdu. They were tortured and kept away for almost a month until domestic and international pressure got too much for the agencies and they were released. Just before their release, rumors were spread that they had committed blasphemy. Within a few days, all of them left Pakistan, likely forever. Salmaan Taseer’s murder had closed the door on any public discussion on blasphemy. The bloggers’ abduction closed the door on public discussion and satire about military establishment.
Once I started my residency in Pathology in 2018, I moved into a different part of Twitter, called PathTwitter. There were many learning opportunities and teaching points that I learned through twitter. I made connections with pathology trainees and pathologists through Twitter. I got two fellowship positions and my PathTwitter connections were pivotal in getting me those. I found the PathTwitter family to be generally welcoming and willing to teach. Like any community, there was a concentration of people in this community who were hyperactive and dominated every conversation. They got invited to give talks about their social media expertise at every meeting in every imaginable city and country. Once Elon Musk took over, things have gone from bad to worse. The old Twitter feed is replaced by random grifters and hidden Ad placements. What has happened to Twitter since Musk took over was succinctly described by this report in the Washington Post: “A site that fueled social movements such as the Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter and #MeToo has veered noticeably rightward under Musk, especially in the United States”.
I have limited my Tweeting, despite still being addicted to it. However, the fever is breaking. I recently signed up for Bluesky and will probably move to it full time once I can find enough people to follow there. This is my tribute and farwell to Twitter.