.....Then came the Mavi Marmara incident, when Israel attacked a ship while that was on its way to Gaza to attempt to break the Israeli siege. Many activists were killed and injured. As a journalist, I was receiving the information updates beforehand for use in my reporting. Ergo, I decided to put my Twitter account—which I rarely used back then—to good use. I started pushing all the exclusive info I was getting into the cybersphere, in real time. In other words, I was “live tweeting”, but that term didn’t exist back then. People started noticing what I was doing. And my pool of followers began expanding.

Then in 2011 the Arab world was hit with a series of unprecedented “revolutions”. It started in Tunisia and slowly crept into Egypt, Libya, Syria and so on. As a Palestinian, living under occupation and siege, aching for freedom, I had to be a part of the regional conversations. So I became an avid user of social media. I was on all platforms, all the time, despite the power outages that have plagued Gaza for years now. I had to find ways to stay updated and alert, so I started looking into ways of remaining connected during power outages, which helped me a great deal during the rest of the Israeli assaults on Gaza and on Palestine in general.

In 2012, the United Nations selected me to participate in their annual training of Palestinian Journalists. It was the first year they stopped focusing on TV and radio, and started focusing more on digital and social media. My work took me all the way to New York, which was a dream come true. Given my experience as a journalist in Gaza and a social media “star” in my country, it was only natural for me to pick “Social Media and Journalism Safety” as the topic for my training project. I was given access to the headquarters of luminaries in the world of news and social media such as Twitter, Google, BBC, Reuters and others. It was like coming full circle, an experience of a lifetime that left me with affirmation and knowledge. Social media had paid off.

The natural progression after this was for us to be threatened, attacked in the cyber world and pushed to be silenced. My email was hacked, my Twitter account was suspended after hackers tried to access it, and my Facebook account was flooded with posts spouting hatred and private messages from people threatening to kill me and my family if I didn't “shut up”. But I didn’t stop, because, as I learned from my training at the UN, sometimes a tweet can change the world.

Now, as Palestine experiences what some are calling the Third Intifada, citizen journalism is again on the frontlines as a primary source of news for the public and for media agencies. Truth is the only propaganda-buster.