“Can you hear me now?”- Ex US Spy Edward Snowden Pulls in Crowd with Twitter Debut; Tweets

Edward Snowden, the ex US National Security Agent contractor who had become a global sensation after leaking details about the federal government’s massive surveillance programs, started his very own Twitter account on Tuesday. His handle was a simple one - @snowden.

Snowden managed to draw in more than 171,000 followers within the first hour and had more than 740,000 by the evening. However the interesting thing was, Snowden chose to follow only one Twitter account – the NSA.

Supporters of Snowden see him as a whistleblower who took the risk of his life, when he challenged the U.S government in exposing their unimaginably massive, illegal surveillance program. The U.S government has filed espionage charges against him for leaking intelligence information, but the federal authorities couldn’t touch him till date. Snowden fled the U.S.A back in May 2013 and has been living in Russia since being granted asylum late in that year.

Snowden’s first tweet was, “Can you hear me now?” Not surprisingly the message was re-tweeted more than 25,000 times within the first hour alone. In his Twitter account, Snowden put down an adequate description of himself by stating: “I used to work for the government. Now I work for the public.”

The initial response on social media was overwhelmingly positive than negative. Based on the results of a Thomson Reuters proprietary algorithm that analyzed Twitter posts mentioning Snowden or about his official twitter account, there were more than 1,109 positive tweets versus the meager 156 negative ones. The ratio was about 7:1, within the first hour of his initial tweet.

Snowden also exchanged tweets with famous astrophysicist and radio-talk show host Neil deGrasse Tyson, who had actually encouraged Snowden to try out the social media platform during an interview on his show earlier this month.

The two talked about the importance of the discovery of water on Mars and Snowden even joked about how his work for the Freedom of the Press Foundation keeps him busy but he still squeezes time for “cat pictures.”

Tyson asked the all important question to Snowden, about how he felt being considered as a traitor as well as a national hero at the same time. Snowden responded that he was “just a citizen with a voice.”