When a Twitter user who presents himself as Kaldrmaš created an account on this social network in 2009, then this platform was "left to its own devices", he says.
"It did not intersect with other media. The topics are music, film, literature, culture, art, a careful talk about politics, but without bigotry," he says.
Today, although far smaller than other social networks like Facebook, Twitter's influence can be far greater - it is used by politicians, media, activists and has become a place to initiate social change, political campaigns and civic activism.
"Many people, regardless of their status, have a need to say something to the world around them - that's where Twitter's success lies," says Jelena Kleut, a communications specialist, for the BBC in Serbian.
In recent years, this social network has been struggling with the less successful side of the platform - combating various forms of digital violence, hate speech and fake news.
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How powerful is this social network?
In March of this year, the first tweet ever by the founder of this network, Jack Dorsey, it sold for almost three million dollars.
It read: "Setting up my Twitter".
With over 350 million users, it is far below YouTube, which has two billion, and Facebook, which has almost three billion users.
It is mostly used in America, Japan, India and Great Britain, data from the Dejtareportal portal show (data report).
The accounts with the most followers vary between American politicians and pop stars, as well as athletes.
Former US President Barack Obama has almost 130 million followers.
Singers Justin Bieber, Katy Perry and Rihanna follow with more than 100 million.
Football player Cristiano Ronaldo has a little more than 90 million followers.
However, the platform is not only used to monitor the activities of favorite public figures.
Several important events in the last decade happened thanks to Twitter.
One of them is the wave of revolutions that spread to many Arab countries starting in 2011, known as the Arab Spring.
Communication specialist Kleut asks the question "would there have been an Arab Spring if it had not been for this network".
"Through that you can see the importance of Twitter," she says.
Watch the video about how the Arab Spring started and whether it brought the desired changes 10 years later:
In addition, Twitter is credited with the rise of a movement that empowered victims to report sexual violence #MeToo and the Black Lives Matter movement (Black Lives Matter), which gained additional importance after the murder of the African-American George Floyd in 2020, on a global level.
Kleut says it's questionable whether these movements would have been as successful if it hadn't been for Twitter.
"Twitter revolutions, as some theorists call them, were created precisely by using this network as an activist resource.
"It is important for the dissemination of information and, in part, for the self-organization of movements and initiatives," he states.
Twitter profiled itself, he adds, as a network where public matters are discussed.
At first, each user could type only 140 letters in one post (tweet), and later this limit was expanded to 280.
Kleut says that the fear that the entire public discussion will be reduced to 140 letters was not justified because "Twitter has indeed become a place of lively discussion and exchange of arguments".
"However, with the increased importance of Twitter in political communication, there were also negative sides - aggressive and violent attacks on dissenters," says Kleut.
What's the catch?
Both those who challenge it and those who praise it, says Kleut, start from the fact that Twitter enables everyone to communicate on a relatively equal basis.
"Those who challenge it allege that certain users are trying to manipulate the 'Twitter' discussion space with opinions that are not authentic," he says.
"Bots" are also the problem of Twitter.
What is a bot?
Andrej Petrovski, Sher Foundation
The word bot has two meanings:
It can be software that is automated to answer or perform some activities, thereby imitating a human using the account.
Bots are also people (trolls) who, on someone's directive, publish content on the Internet that can be affirmative or offensive, mostly for the political goal of certain structures.
Bots in Serbia or anywhere in the world work according to the same principle.
It is a group of people, usually party activists, who want to contribute to their party.
However, where it goes beyond classic party activism, to which everyone has a legitimate right, is when such activity is institutionalized in some way, that is, a structure is created, the so-called troll factory.
In those factories, we have people who sometimes get paid to market certain content.
In April 2020, two months before the parliamentary and local elections, Twitter removed 8.558 accounts from Serbia,
They cited "participation in the coordinated promotion of the ruling party and its leader" as the reason.
Towards the end of last year, we identified clusters of accounts engaged in inauthentic coordinated activity which led to the removal of 8,558 accounts working to promote Serbia's ruling party and its leader.
— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) April 2, 2020
"The accounts were removed because they violated the policy of this social network and undermined public discussion," they stated in the statement.
In the report "Fight like a lion for Serbia" The Stanford University Internet Observatory in California reported that more than eight and a half thousand accounts engaged in retweeting.
"Mostly they retweeted content from Aleksandar Vučić's profile and accounts that supported the president," one of the authors of the study, Daniel Bush, told the BBC in Serbian.
He added that in addition to retweets of content from the president's profile, these profiles also responded to the tweets of President Vučić's account with messages of support.
Twitter, media and fake news
Making news out of tweets has long been an established practice.
Communication specialist Kleut says that Twitter has become an important source of information for the media.
"It is certain that the media and political discourse today would not look the same if it were not for Twitter, because much more than some other social networks it has taken on the role of public information and public debate," he states.
The editor of the portal specialized in debunking fake news, FejkNews researcher Stefan Janjić, says that it is noticeable that a large number of media in Serbia create their agenda by following trends on Twitter.
"It can be useful, since Twitter is an extremely fast source of information.
"When they recently explosions occurred in Čačak, tweeters reported on it at the same moment, hours before the mainstream media, since the explosions started after midnight," he told the BBC in Serbian.
He adds that a similar type of exclusive information could be found on Twitter last year as well. during the July protests.
"However, on the other hand, the media often take some unverified tweet, tweet-discussion or insult as a sufficient reason for reporting, without any element of public interest, which perfectly corresponds to the copy-paste principle of journalism and increasing readership with bizarre and unverified information", he states.
Kleut reminds that, although in a celebratory mood, we should not forget that Twitter is used by a relatively small number of citizens in Serbia, less than 10 percent of Internet users.
According to the website Data report for the year 2021, almost 300.000 people in Serbia use Twitter, and about 3,2 million people use Facebook.
However, he adds that it is used by those who have social power, so the events on Twitter are transmitted into the lives of those who do not have Twitter.
This is perhaps best seen in the example of former US President Donald Trump.
Kleut says that the question is whether the media and political phenomenon of Donald Trump would be possible without Twitter.
"Twitter enabled him to 'skip' media filters and address voters directly," he says.
He had 88 million followers before his death account permanently terminated at the beginning of the year "because of the glorification of violence" at the protests in Washington.
Trump won the presidential election in November 2016, although they polls showed that his opponent Hillary Clinton has far more support.
Then bots, allegedly originating from Russia, were used on Twitter writes Time magazine, which likely increased Trump's vote by 3,23 percent.
They spread tweets of support for Trump, which were then spread further by his supporters.
Too, there are support groups on Facebook to the former president became numerous and massive, and they often shared fake news about Clinton, as well as articles in which Trump was portrayed in a good light.
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Twitter, like other social networks, can be a fertile ground for the spread of fake news.
Janjić says that until now the biggest research about fake news conducted right on Twitter.
"This social network is more transparent than all other influential online platforms when it comes to the possibilities of monitoring the speed and model of the spread of disinformation," he says.
The aforementioned research found that fake news spreads six times faster than true news, and that fake news has a 70 percent chance of being retweeted compared to the truth.
"Incorrect information, photo montages and authentic photos with incorrect descriptions can often be found on Twitter, while examples of video manipulation are somewhat rarer.
"If we were to compare Facebook and Twitter, we would see different approaches to countering this kind of content," he says.
He adds that Facebook has entered into a partnership with services for checking information - in Serbia with With a true meter i by the AFP news agency - and through this cooperation reduces the visibility of misinformation.
"On the other hand, Twitter in Serbia does not cooperate with experts, but the 'volunteer' work of enthusiastic tweeters is proving to be a powerful model for the fight against fake news.
"From the experience of working on the FakeNews detector, I notice the following - by the time readers report a suspicious tweet to us and by the time we get to see what it is about, one of the tweeters has already conducted an analysis - googled, reviewed databases, found the correct information, an authentic photo," he says. .
He states that among the tweeters there are many who are extremely media literate, and their short tweet-analyses are generally very highly positioned among the responses to the original tweet.
"Such a mechanism is much less often observed on Facebook, and even when it happens, it is not visible enough," he says.
Twitter and the corona virus pandemic
A tweeter who calls himself Kaldrmaš tells the BBC in Serbian that Twitter is a fast news network, but that its use, as an observer/reader or as a content creator, requires a certain amount of responsibility and knowledge.
"As we saw during the corona virus pandemic, we cannot force anyone to do that," he states.
Misinformation about the corona virus was present on all social networks, including on Twitter.
Janjić states that Facebook was still a bigger breeding ground for inaccurate content than Twitter.
"This is shown by research conducted by the SiČek regional network (SeeCheck) on a sample of 4.654 misinformation.
"I believe that the aforementioned 'self-defense' mechanism on Twitter contributed to this, where enthusiastic tweeters 'separated the wheat from the chaff' in an extremely short period of time," he says.
He states that the system of "quoting" should not be forgotten, by means of which tweeters-disinformers are exposed to some kind of public shame when it is determined that they have lied, which can further lead them to be more careful.
Twitter and Serbia - what and how we tweet about
Kaldrmaš says that the "community" on this network in the very beginning was a group of people that was not limited or tied only to Serbia.
"The first larger community was grouped around a common language that we used to call Serbo-Croatian or Croatian-Serbian.
"The grouping was not territorial, but linguistic," he says.
He adds that people of different ages from different parts of former Yugoslavia discovered "the other side and connected".
"Even people from Rijeka or Zagreb came to visit Belgrade and vice versa.
"It wasn't just a romantic relationship, it was also a friendship that still lasts," he says.
He adds that hatred, which is now a recognizable feature of this network, was not so present then.
A recent example is the flood of racist tweets after the final match of the European Championship between England and Italy, played on July 11.
Three of England's footballers, who are black, missed penalties in extra time, and England lost.
Twitter is within 24 hours tired to delete more than 1.000 tweets, as well as to permanently terminate accounts with racist content.
When it comes to the region, almost half of the reports on Facebook and Twitter refer to hate speech, it showed research by the Balkan Investigative Journalist Network (BIRN).
It added that any other posts reported as hate speech, threats of violence or harassment remain online.
Staša Ivković was also a victim of attacks and threats.
She is in March this year disclosed the existence of groups on the Telegram application in which men, mostly from the Balkans, exchange pornographic videos, photos, but also the addresses of women and girls - mostly without their consent.
And when she posted details from this group on Twitter, her photo began to be shared in Telegram groups along with threats and insults.
Some of the trends in Serbia in the last few years have been diverse - from the corona virus, the presidential elections in America, the series South Wind, Game of Thrones, Shadows in the Balkans and My Father's Killer, to the reality show Zadruga.
Kleut says that according to the latest business moves by Twitter, it seems that we can expect changes.
"Twitter has introduced the option of video stories in certain markets (Fleet), and in Canada and Australia launched the Twitter Blue plugin, which offers paid subscription and support for more active users.
"The market race with other platforms can, I'm afraid, change the character of this social network," he says.
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