In this epic Ukrainian resistance, Vladimir Zelensky’s sense of Twitter is striking. The ability to use it to quickly give essential information, above all the fact of being still alive and not on the run while saying the opposite; or to galvanize his fellow citizens when the Russian advance suddenly slowed down; and to hold diplomatic relations, first by spurring Europe and the United States to do more, and then by revealing the concrete aid pledges he is getting over and over in phone calls with various leaders. Zelensky’s Twitter profile, where posts in English and Ukrainian alternate, has thus far been essential to understand what was happening. But more generally, Twitter is proving crucial once again.
When the going gets tough, when really important things happen, this social network is essential. From this point of view, however, the Russian invasion of Ukraine confirms the substantial decline of Facebook, that in the past it also played an important role on similar occasions, for example in the Arab Spring; and the lack of permeability to the big news stories of Instagram is highlighted, useful only for sharing photos; while on TikTok there are thousands of videos that tell moments of armed clashes, it is true, but basically they are videos without context; you look at them, you listen to the shots and explosions, but the stories are missing .. That context that instead on Twitter he finds himself following the minute-by-minute stories of two newspapers in Kiev, but also the profile of the president of Russia, where he aseptically accounts for Putin’s meetings and phone calls. Over all stands Zelensky who is there that looks us in the eye and speaks to us, giving back a humanity and a closeness to what is happening. The stakes are not far off, he reminds us, we are the stakes.