Twitter for every anti-militarist

Table of contents

1. What is Twitter?
2. Why use Twitter?
3. Doubts and downsides with using Twitter
3.1 Poorly judged tweets can cause trouble!
3.2 Risk of receiving abuse
3.3 What if I’m not that good/confident at it?
3.4 Time considerations
3.5 The social media ‘echo chamber’
4. Differences between Twitter and Facebook
5. Sign up for a Twitter account
6. Security and privacy issues – think about these first!
6.1 Do you want to use your real full name?
6.2 How many Twitter accounts – one or more than one?
6.3 How to protect your tweets (if you want to)
6.4 Be smart about disclosing your whereabouts/activities!
7. Optimising your Twitter profile
7.1 How to create your bio
8. Follow other Twitter users
8.1 Search for individual users to follow
8.2 Organise the people you follow: create lists
8.3 Subscribe to existing public lists
9. How to link your Twitter to your Facebook (if you want to)
10. Basic concepts and shorthand for day-to-day Twitter use
10.1 Usernames
10.2 Hashtags
10.3 Mentions
10.4 Replies
10.5 Retweets
10.6 Likes
11. Composing tweets of your own
11.1 Basic text entry
11.2 Staying within the 280-character limit
11.3 Adding a weblink to your tweet
11.4 Adding an image to your tweet
12. Keeping on top of the response you get: the notifications tab
13. Direct messages
14. How to get noticed and get more followers
15. Disrupting military accounts

 

1. What is Twitter?

Twitter is a microblogging service that enables its users to publish short messages (known as ‘tweets‘) up to 280 characters in length, on a personalised news feed. (“Characters” include spaces and punctuation marks as well as letters.) The historic 140-character limit was doubled in late 2017.

A blog (contraction of “web log”) is any personal online journal on which an individual publicly records events, opinions, or links to other sites or media. You can “cross-post” YouTube videos or any less abbreviated blog post or webpage as links in Twitter, including a suitable summary or teaser of their content.

You can use twitter.com, an app, or SMS to post to Twitter. (If you’d like to use Twitter on your smartphone or tablet, it’s easiest to use the Twitter app. Depending on your device you can download this from the Apple Store, Google Play Store or Windows Store.)

Twitter provides a ‘news feed‘ which displays the latest posts from other users you have chosen to follow. This allows for immediacy and intensity of discussion on any given issue. Twitter’s hashtag function allows you to immediately focus in on a specific conversation, while the lists function allows you to monitor what any particular subset of users are currently talking about.

2. Why use Twitter?

Twitter has 13 million UK users. While Facebook has 33 million UK users, Twitter is particularly suited to focused use for activism/politics. It’s the most efficient social media platform for activist-to-activist and activist-to-professional sharing and communication:

• You can ‘live tweet‘ from any event or action – a series of tweets describing what’s going on in real time.
• The immediacy of Twitter, with its facility for instant sharing of other users’ content, facilitates rapid organising, responses and information-sharing.
• You can build different ‘lists‘ of Twitter accounts (groups and individuals) focused on different activist issues – and monitor whichever list you choose at any given moment. You can also subscribe to existing public lists.
• Twitter is highly influential with mainstream journalists (much more so than other social media platforms), lowering the bar for them to get a snapshot of public opinion, and many media outlets report notable happenings on Twitter as news in its own right.

The ‘digital conversation’ is influential for many:

• You can express your own views unobtrusively. It greatly lowers the bar for spreading things you think are important – compare the impact of posting something on Twitter for your friends to see, versus attempting to raise the same thing with any of them face-to-face.
• It is much quicker and easier to post to Twitter than to maintain a regular blog or website, or any physical publication.
• You have the opportunity to interact both with people known to you and with strangers.
• Twitter, like other social media, particularly reaches the younger generation who are much less engaged with conventional media such as newspapers and TV news.
• Users choose who they want to see, and within those parameters Twitter’s news feed is intentionally eclectic – not sectionalised like a newspaper or news bulletin.
• Compared to any form of physical leafleting, you can engage people where they are without any form of intrusion.
• You don’t need activists or any budget to get your messages out.
• There is no journalist filter – and a substantial element of genuine democracy, in that each ordinary Twitter user can choose which conversations to join and which content to spread further, and which to ignore.
• Twitter can be used to engage and energise your existing supporters.
• Being active on Twitter helps the anti-militarist movement to appear in touch with the modern world.

3. Doubts and downsides with using Twitter

3.1 Poorly judged tweets can cause trouble! 

You may well have heard news stories about counter-productive political tweets. An example of this from the anti-militarist realm…

Ben Duncan was a councillor in Brighton & Hove who tweeted this (right) on Armed Forces Day in 2014. The tweet caused a national media storm and many formal complaints. In response Cllr Duncan was removed from the Green Party group of councillors and forced to sit as an independent, and found guilty of breaching the council’s code of conduct. File under how not to promote the anti-militarist cause…

3.2 Risk of receiving abuse

You may also have heard about abuse on Twitter. It is sadly a fact of digital debate that the opportunity for anonymity combined with the lack of face-to-face or voice contact makes it easy for normal standards of human courtesy to fall by the wayside. Significant numbers of ‘trolls’ roam the platform. Abuse does tend to be directed predominantly at people who have significant public profiles or who are fronting up particularly contentious campaigns, but anyone who joins in with public questioning of the veneration of our armed forces may provoke rage from opponents. Here are a few points to think about:

• You can instantly block any Twitter user, which will prevent them from ever again being able to view your profile or any of your tweets, or to interact with you in any way. However, if a malicious user were motivated to do so, they may well be able to simply use another Twitter account to reach you again.
• Very often, one or two malicious replies to a tweet are visibly outweighed by the quantity of users who have clicked ‘Like’ on the tweet.
• Any user (or tag-team of users) can themselves reply to malicious tweets – not that you should feel any obligation to do so rather than ignore them.
• Disruption tactics – proactively replying to tweets by military accounts, aiming to primarily be seen by active supporters of the military – are by far the highest-risk tactics for a grassroots anti-militarist on social media. You will keep your risk of negative attention much lower if you avoid this kind of activity and keep to posting in more conventional fashion.
• There is a menu option for every tweet to report it to Twitter, selecting “It’s abusive or harmful“. Twitter have been forced by public and media pressure to substantially up their game in protecting against hate speech and permanently removing its online and real-world perpetrators from the platform, although they’re widely considered to have a long way further to go.
• You might like to take a moment or two in advance to think about how you would deal with receiving abuse in the event that you are targeted:
  • How will you limit the personal information which can be found from (anywhere on) your Twitter account, to protect yourself against more intrusive digital, or even real-world, targeting?
  • Who could you turn to for real-world support if you receive something nasty?
  • Have you previously received any kind of over-the-top negativity for any of your political opinions, and how did you deal with it then?
  • Your mental health is always crucial, and if in doubt then it’s totally fine to decide that Twitter isn’t for you.

3.3 What if I’m not that good/confident at it? 

Twitter and other social media platforms take a little bit of getting used to, but no specialist skills are needed to become an effective user. An excellent initial approach for a less confident new user is to start out by simply retweeting good tweets from other users you follow. This will start to give you a feel for tweeting style and what works well, which should help you build up a little confidence to start composing your own tweets whenever you’re ready.

Additionally, this guide goes on to show you how you can share news articles to Twitter directly from the news website, without even having Twitter open. (See section 11.3.)

3.4 Time considerations

Obviously, maintaining a Twitter presence takes some time. However, the platform is pretty much designed to be highly accessible for busy people to use:

• The smartphone app allows you to conveniently snatch odd moments on Twitter (say when you’re on a train or bus, or waiting).
• You can tweet in a matter of seconds, or find something useful to retweet within a minute or two.
• Finding a little one-off time to organise ‘lists’ of users will help you to monitor only the content that is important to you at any given moment, filtering out what you don’t want/need to see.

3.5 The social media ‘echo chamber’

You’ve probably heard something about the ‘bubble’ or ‘echo chamber’ on social media – the tendency for users’ news feeds to be taken up largely with opinions they already agree with. This is a major limitation of the persuasive power of the medium which should not be underestimated, and it’s always good to assess critically whether any social media action has made as much difference as might be casually claimed for it.

However at the same time:

• The echo chamber is not hermetically sealed for as long as people are connected to each other on Twitter for reasons other than politics. If you are comfortable using one Twitter account to post on multiple topics (e.g. both anti-militarism and one or more non-political interests), and connecting that account with friends/family/colleagues and strangers who share the non-political interest in addition to other anti-militarists, some of that wider cross-section of followers will also see some of your anti-militarist tweets. (This is more strongly true of Twitter than of Facebook.)
• You can reply to any Twitter user, appearing on the public list of replies to any tweet. You can therefore proactively use the platform specifically to ‘disrupt‘ military and militarist accounts and conversations, thus getting seen primarily by opponents (provided you’re braced for hostile responses), in addition to or even instead of communicating with your own circles. (See section 15 for more…)
• “Trending on Twitter” lists are available – and often referred by journalists – which are ‘straight’ rankings of the most discussed topics at any given moment. If you contribute to making a particular topic ‘trend’, that has an objective relevance outside your community of interest.

4. Differences between Twitter and Facebook

Already used Facebook and wondering how Twitter is different? Here’s a quick rundown of key differences. (Skip straight to the next section if you don’t need this…)

•  Twitter is just micro-blogging – it does not attempt to be as wide-ranging as Facebook, so no games, no calendar and so on.
  • While you can post event publicity to Twitter, Facebook remains the go-to platform for both organising and finding real-world events.
  • There is no Twitter equivalent of Facebook groups (community of interest spaces)
• There is only one type of Twitter account (no distinction between individuals and organisations, unlike Facebook’s “page” system). If you have a Twitter account as an individual and help to run a separate account for your group, these will have separate logins and not be linked, as they would have to be on Facebook. While some kinds of Facebook outreach can only come from a personal account, a group’s Twitter page can be used for unrestricted outreach without it being associated with an individual.
• You can always see full lists of users that each Twitter account follows and is followed by – this is great for rapidly building your own followers list.
• Building or following Twitter “lists” allow you to see unlimited separate feeds of whichever users you want:
  • e.g. You can use one Twitter list of anti-militarist groups/activists, and another list for different accounts associated with a different interest.
  • Facebook does not allow personal accounts to build lists containing organisational “pages” or non-friends or public groups, while Facebook pages can only build lists of other pages. This makes holistic monitoring of activist circles inefficient and unwieldy – a major limitation on activist-to-activist use of Facebook compared to Twitter.
• Twitter was built as fundamentally public:
  • By default everything you post can be seen by anyone.
  • If you want to run a private Twitter account, you need to ‘protect’ your account right at the start (see section 6.3).
• Twitter officially allows multiple personal accounts, Facebook only one.
• Twitter also has no difficulty with pseudonyms and/or using first name only, unlike Facebook which has historically attempted to enforce use of full real names on all personal accounts.
• ‘High volume’ is no problem on Twitter; the news feed retains a strong element of showing all tweets ‘live’. In contrast Facebook’s news feed is less strongly chronological and aims to limit the total amount of news feed space any single user takes up, so if you post more than a few times per day on Facebook each post will typically be seen by fewer people.
  • Related to this difference, any one tweet will tend to be seen by a lower proportion of your followers, and get less traction/response, than one equivalent Facebook post…
    • This incentivises spacing your tweets out more evenly, so that you ‘catch’ a greater proportion of your followers at a time when they are on Twitter.
    • Twitter (unlike Facebook page publishing) has no native functionality to ‘schedule’ posts for publication at a future time. However you can use third-party app Hootsuite to do this.
• There is a fixed 280-character limit on text of tweets; Facebook posts can be of unlimited length.
  • Twitter video uploads are limited to 2 minutes 20 seconds. If your video is longer than this, you will need to upload it elsewhere, e.g. to YouTube, and post a link on Twitter instead.
• Twitter discussion/trends are typically taken more seriously by professionals, including journalists and politicians.

5. Sign up for a Twitter account

First you’ll need to create a Twitter account:

• Go to twitter.com or the Twitter app on your device.
• Select ‘Sign up‘.
• Enter the full name you want to appear on the account and with your tweets.
• Enter either a phone number or email address – you will need this to activate the account, and in the event that you lose access to the account.
• A couple of screens later on, choose your Twitter username with care. Related to Twitter’s inherent brevity, try to keep your username short – if using your name, consider abbreviating it in some way.

6. Security and privacy issues – think about these first!

6.1 Do you want to use your real full name?

On Twitter using your real full name is entirely optional. Using your first name only or a pseudonym is fine (although, will people who know you be able to recognise you?!)

6.2 How many Twitter accounts – one or more than one?

Twitter allows you to run multiple accounts if you want to.

An important question for you at this point is: Do you want to use one account for anti-militarism and (now or in the future) a separate account for your personal and/or professional interests and connections? Or do you want to use the same account to post on both anti-militarism and your other interests?

There is no right or wrong answer to this, and attitudes differ:

• Do you have many contacts in other realms of your life whom you wouldn’t want (for any reason) to see your anti-militarism posts?
• Or, do you feel positive about people connected to you for a different reason seeing some anti-militarist posts intermingled with other posts about your other shared interest(s)?

Your decision will affect the impact that you have on Twitter. The trade-off is as follows:

• Having a mixture of anti-militarist and ‘general’ followers on Twitter is a prime way to break out of the political ‘echo chamber’ – because it means that your anti-militarist tweets will be seen by some Twitter users who are not looking for anti-militarist content.
• However if you post on a mixture of unrelated topics, any given tweet will probably not be of interest to a substantial proportion of your followers. Realistically this may lessen your account’s potential to build up and retain followers and influence in activist circles.

If you do want to dedicate this account to activism and you are aiming to maintain separation and privacy between your activist identity and a more personal identity, avoid one of your accounts following the other account, as follower/following lists are public! If you run two Twitter accounts, you can of course use two different names or versions of your name.

6.3 How to protect your tweets (if you want to)

If you want only the users that you approve to be able to see your tweets and follow your account (along similar lines to Facebook), instead of allcomers being able to see everything, you need to manually turn on protection of your tweets:

• Bring up the menu by clicking/touching the circular avatar in the top right-hand corner (next to the Tweet button) in desktop Twitter, or in the top left-hand corner on the Twitter app.
• Settings and privacy menu and select Protect your tweets.

If you activate this on an account that already has followers, you will then have to manually go through your followers list and “block” any individual followers you want privacy from.

6.4 Be smart about disclosing your whereabouts/activities!

You may have heard stories about people who have been burgled while on holiday, as a direct result of posting publicly on social media about being away from home.

A very simple principle of activist social media security is: If there’s anyone you wouldn’t want to know where you are or what you’re doing, don’t make a public social media post about it! Wait until afterwards to post, or refer to the ‘How to protect your tweets’ section above to control who can see your tweets.

7. Optimising your Twitter profile

After creating your account, the next priority is to work on your pithy ‘bio‘ – the maximum length of this is 160 characters. It’s important to make your bio clear and relevant to the people you want to follow.

The reason to do this first is that people thinking of following you (for example because they see that you have followed them) may read your bio to see if they have reason to follow you.

At the same time you should also add:

• a suitable profile photo – either a photo of yourself, or if you’re not up for that, some other image which visually conveys something relevant to your intended Twitter presence; and
• a suitable ‘header photo’ – this will take up the whole width of the screen at the top of your profile.

7.1 How to create your bio

• Click/touch your name from the Twitter homepage (in the app, touch the circular avatar in the very top left-hand corner first).
• Select Edit profile.
• The view will then change, and you will be able to:
  • click/touch to type inside the bio text box;
  • upload a profile picture by clicking Change your profile photo; and
  • upload a header image by clicking Change your header photo.

8. Follow other Twitter users

The next step is to follow some other Twitter users.

8.1 Search for individual users to follow

Think of a group or individual you’d like to follow, then:

• Click inside the Search box in the top right-hand corner of desktop Twitter, or touch the magnifying glass icon at the top of the Twitter app and then touch in the search box which appears above.
• Type the name of someone on Twitter you want to follow into the search box.
• Hopefully their profile will come up in search results while you type (name in bold with their picture and Twitter username).
• Click/touch to go to their profile page then click the Follow button.

Repeat for other users you know you want to follow.

You can find more people to follow by looking at the “following” lists (or “followers” lists) of other interesting accounts. These can be found from their profile page, with a convenient Follow button next to each name:

8.2 Organise the people you follow: create lists

If you’re following lots of people, you may find that you’re not seeing all the tweets from the users who are most important to you. If you’re following users from different communities of interest, you might have to sift through unrelated tweets even if at that moment you’re particularly looking for (say) anti-militarist tweets,.

For easy reference, you can organise some of the people you follow into a list.

• To add someone to a list, go to their profile then click the ‘three dots’ icon on the right-hand side, and from the menu click/touch Add or remove from lists.

• In the pop-up that follows, you can choose to create a new list or add the person to one you’ve already created:
  • When creating a new list, you have the option to make it either public (allowing any other Twitter user to subscribe to it) or private (so only you can see it). 
• Once you have your list(s) built, you can access them any time by clicking/touching on your circular profile avatar at the top and selecting Lists.

8.3 Subscribe to existing public lists

If a Twitter account is subscribed to public lists or appears on any, this will be shown next to the tweets/following/followers/likes numbers at the top of the profile page:

• Click on this tab to show the lists.
• Click on a list you want to peruse.
• To subscribe to the list, click Subscribe in the top left.

9. How to link your Twitter to your Facebook (if you want to)

If you want to, you can link your Twitter account to a personal Facebook profile, so that every tweet also automatically appears as a Facebook status update:

• In desktop Twitter only, click on your circular avatar in the top right-hand corner then select Settings and privacy from the menu.
• From the left-hand menu, select Apps towards the bottom.
• Then from the Applications list find Facebook Connect and click the Connect to Facebook button then follow the further instructions.

10. Basic concepts and shorthand for day-to-day Twitter use

Twitter is intentionally minimalist and bitesize. There are a handful of symbols/abbreviations to get used to – it only takes a few minutes to get your head around them.

10.1 Usernames

The @ symbol prefaces every username on Twitter – e.g. @ForcesWatch, @PPUtoday.

10.2 Hashtags

# is used at the start of a “hashtag”- e.g. #WarIsNotFamilyEntertainment or #GunsArentForKids.

Hashtags contain no spaces or punctuation marks. You can type a hashtag with a full stop, comma or apostrophe at the end, but the hashtag will end before that punctuation mark. For legibility, you can optionally capitalise the first letter of a multi-word hashtag – e.g. #GunsArentForKids is considerably easier and clearer to read than #gunsarentforkids. Capitalisation is disregarded in hashtag search results.

Clicking on a hashtag shows you all recent tweets (by anyone) with the same hashtag. Thus they serve the function of categorising a public conversation, allowing you to go straight to that conversation. A hashtag can also be used for a specific time-limited purpose salient to a specific group of users such as event attendees – for example the Take Action on Militarism 2017 Gathering used #TAOM2017.

Recommended etiquette is to aim for a maximum of 2 hashtags per tweet. #Hashtags can be a #useful #tool, but this is #toomany in a #single #tweet. #annoying #overwhelming

If you’re seeking to create a new hashtag, or you’re less than 100% sure which hashtag is in use for a given topic, type your intended hashtag into the Twitter search box first. This allows you to check it’s the “right” one (e.g. #TAOM2017 not #TAOM), and that it isn’t already being used for something else somewhere else in the world – something which you might not wish to be associated with!

10.3 Mentions

Putting someone else’s username (with the @) in your tweet is known as mentioning them. The person you ‘mention’ will get a notification in their notifications tab, so a mention can act as a particularly unobtrusive way of making contact with another user.

‘Mentions’ are always “clickable links”:

• If a follower of yours clicks on a name you have mentioned, they will land on that person or group’s Twitter page.
• This will give them the opportunity to follow that account.
• Do you want to do this for opponents? You may wish to write the name of an opponent as a hashtag instead of a ‘mention’, e.g. #BritishArmy rather than @BritishArmy. This gives your followers an opportunity to click through to tweets about the British Army rather than the British Army’s own tweets.

10.4 Replies

Putting another user’s username at the start of a tweet is treated as a reply instead of a mention. This is still public but only people who follow both of you will see the tweet in their feed.

Reply automatically to a specific tweet by clicking the speech bubble underneath – your tweet will be pre-populated with the appropriate username.

If you want to start a tweet with a username for any reason but not have its news feed display limited to users who follow you both, type a full stop as the first character of your tweet followed by the username – eg: .@ForcesWatch says…

10.5 Retweets

A retweet is simply a re-post or share of someone else’s tweet on your own profile. It takes two clicks, starting by clicking the icon which resembles a ‘recycle’ icon underneath any tweet.

You are given the opportunity to add your own covering text (which might include a hashtag for better categorisation) to any retweet before posting it.

If a tweet (or indeed a retweet) of yours is retweeted by another Twitter user, this will appear in your Notifications tab.

Next to the retweet symbol underneath each tweet appears a number (if higher than zero) showing the number of users who have so far retweeted that tweet.

When someone else’s retweet appears on your news feed, you can identify it as such because “[username] Retweeted” will appear in small grey print above the retweet.

This of course means that you will see some (re)tweets on your news feed from Twitter users you may not yourself follow.

10.6 Likes

Clicking the heart icon underneath a tweet simply expresses that you like it, without retweeting it – the online equivalent of beeping one’s horn in support without stopping.

You receive a notification when someone likes a tweet of yours. Next to the heart symbol underneath any tweet appears the number of users (if higher than zero) who have so far liked that tweet.

11. Composing tweets of your own

11.1 Basic text entry

In desktop Twitter, there are two methods for composing an original tweet. Either:

• Click and type in the box marked “What’s happening?” at the top of the homepage, or
• from any screen in Twitter, click the Tweet button in in top-right hand corner.

When done click the Tweet button and your tweet is duly posted.

In the Twitter app, simply touch the blue circle with a quill and a + sign in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen. Then type your tweet, and touch Tweet in the top right-hand corner.

If you’re ever not sure if your tweet has successfully posted, simply go back to your profile and check the top tweet there.

11.2 Staying within the 280-character limit

You must stay within the 280-character limit, or you will not be able to send your tweet (the Tweet button will be greyed out) until you have reduced the length of your tweet to within the limit.

When you are getting close to the limit (within 20 characters), a number showing the number of remaining characters will appear in the bottom right-hand corner of the text entry box. A negative number means you are over the limit, and the excess characters will be highlighted in red.

If you are struggling to convey your point within the character limit, here are a few quick tips:

• Find shorter synonyms for longer words
• Use ‘+’ or ‘&’ instead of ‘and’
• Lose non-essential pronouns/articles – e.g. ‘the’, ‘that’, ‘I’
• Substitute numbers for words
• Use common abbreviations – e.g. ‘w/’ for ‘with’, ‘btw’
• Lose vowels from words – e.g. ‘text’ -> ‘txt’.

Twitter is assuredly not the place for language snobs!

11.3 Adding a weblink to your tweet

Simply copy and paste the weblink from your browser into the Twitter text entry box.

Weblinks get automatically ‘abbreviated’, but they do take up approximately 23 characters of your tweet’s 280-character limit.

Alternatively, many websites (especially media websites) provide sharing button for you to automatically share a link to the current webpage to Twitter or other social media platforms – without even having to be logged into Twitter.

You will have a chance to alter the covering text of the tweet on the next screen before clicking Tweet to confirm, but hopefully the text box will be pre-populated for you with the article’s headline as well as the weblink. (This may be hit-and-miss on less professionally resourced websites with sharing buttons.)

11.4 Adding an image to your tweet

You may specifically wish to tweet an image (e.g. a photo of an action or event), or you may just wish to add an image to a text-based tweet to help it stand out. Adding an image to your tweet does not use up any of your 280 characters.

There are two methods for adding an image to a tweet:

• Direct from your smartphone – this involves starting with the image in place of starting in the ‘Tweet’ dialogue:
  • You should see (or easily find) this ‘Share’ icon (right) directly when looking at photos you’ve taken on your smartphone.
  • Select Twitter from the available options, add some covering text to your tweet and post.
• On Twitter itself: Simply click the camera button directly underneath the text entry box, and upload your image.

12. Keeping on top of the response you get: the notifications tab

The Notifications tab contains updates of every time someone:

• follows you;
• likes one of your tweets;
• retweets you;
• mentions you; or
• replies to one of your tweets.

Whenever you have unread notifications, a number will appear next to the Notifications icon indicating how many.

13. Direct messages

You can also send and receive one-to-one direct messages (‘DMs’) to/from other Twitter users. You have a Messages tab in the top menu ribbon – whenever you have an unread message, a number will appear next to the icon indicating how many unread messages.

You are likely to receive occasional spammy DMs, but the system compares well to email in this regard.

To send a direct message to another user:

• Click the Messages icon (in the Twitter app, this is just the envelope symbol).
• Then click New Message.
• Type the beginning of the name of a user you follow, select the name from the suggestions which appear, and click Next.
• Type your message in the text entry box at the bottom (you can also attach an image if you wish), and then click Send.

Be aware that some Twitter users dislike being sent DMs. However, the facility can be particularly useful if you are unable to find an email address for the individual or group in question.

14. How to get noticed and get more followers

There is one main shortcut available to you to quickly acquire a decent base of followers. Twitter initially allows you to follow up to 5,000 accounts. As everyone you follow receives a notification that you have followed them, it gives them the opportunity to check out your profile and potentially click ‘Follow’. Thus, provided that you have completed your bio indicating some shared interest with your followees (e.g anti-militarism), then some proportion of the users you follow are likely to follow you back (especially other grass-roots users/groups without large numbers of followers themselves). You can find hundreds of suitable users to initially follow in one place by bringing up a list of followers or followees of an appropriate account (e.g. ForcesWatch).

It’s generally a good idea to publish your Twitter username in your other media – in your email signature, on your blog if you have one, and at the bottom of any articles you publish in your own name. A one-off email and/or Facebook post to suitable friends and/or colleagues making them aware that you are now on Twitter may also be reasonable.

The biggest compliment you can pay someone on Twitter is to retweet them. Other supportive things you can do are to ‘like’ their tweets, or respond to them in a friendly fashion. Such interactions with other users will make you visible to them and give them the opportunity to follow you.

Ultimately there is no substitute for posting interesting original tweets, with the main aim in follower-building terms of getting retweeted, so that you become visible to your retweeter’s followers. The more impressed other users are by what they see of your post(s), the more likely they are to choose to follow you.

If you have one or more particularly interesting original tweets you are seeking maximum traction for, it can be reasonable to reach out specifically to other Twitter users (maybe ones with more followers than you) asking them to retweet you. There are two main ways you can do this:

• You can reply to your own tweet, ‘mentioning’ the other accounts you are hoping might retweet you – e.g. “Any chance of retweeting this? @ForcesWatch @PPUtoday @peace_news @PoppiesForPeace @endthewarnews @wagingnv Thanks! :)”  Try to mention all the accounts in one tweet, instead of replying (visibly!) multiple times to your own tweet.
• You can instead send direct messages to the accounts you’re seeking a retweet from.

Please always be respectful of other Twitter users and use these approaches (especially DMs) sparingly and selectively.

You can also retweet any of your own tweets once, giving them another opportunity to appear in the news feeds of followers who may not have seen them first time around.

15. Disrupting military accounts

As discussed earlier, the Twitter equivalent of ethical direct action is to reply to tweets by military organisations. You can seek to disrupt the conversations they are trying to have, and to make an anti-militarist voice visible to users following military accounts (who will typically have social media ‘echo chambers’ of their own, likely to be a long way removed from yours!).

Here is a starter list of military spaces on Twitter you might consider disrupting:

• British Army – @BritishArmy
• Armed Forces Day – @ArmedForcesDay
• Army Jobs – @ArmyJobs
• Army Cadets – @ArmyCadetsUK
• Forces TV – @Forces_TV
• Army Outreach – @ArmyOTSouthWest, @ArmyOTSouthEast
• Army Foundation College (AFC) Harrogate – @AFCHarrogate
• Defence Operations – @DefenceOps
• Army Scotland – @ArmyScotland
• Army HQ Scotland – @ASengaged

As explained in section 10.4, you can reply automatically to any specific tweet by clicking the speech bubble icon underneath the tweet. You can either:

• compose your own (responsible!) reply text, or
• copy and paste the URL of an existing tweet from elsewhere. To do this in desktop Twitter:
  • once you have located (on any profile or feed) the tweet you wish to reproduce, click on that tweet to bring it up as a new window; then
  • select the URL in your browser’s address bar;
  • right-click the URL and select Copy;
  • then return to the military tweet you wish to disrupt, click the reply button on the tweet, and then right-click inside the text entry box and select Paste.

Disruption will only be effective using an account with tweets set to public (Twitter’s default option) – if your tweets have been manually set to ‘protected’, then none of your intended audience will be able to see your disruption tweets.

Bear in mind that any Twitter user can instantly block you, after which you will have no further access to that account or any of its tweets. Therefore a sustained disruption campaign may be more sustainable if you can work collaboratively with others.