Reuters reports, “Delighted at his cyber success, Venezuela’s new Twitter convert President Hugo Chavez on Thursday invited Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Bolivian President Evo Morales to join the micro-blogging site too.”
Chavez — who describes himself as a Bolivarian soldier, a socialist and an anti-Imperialist — said he would use the site to spread Bolivarian revolution. Castro and Morales are two of his strongest allies in anti-American sentiment.
Although President Chavez wasn’t always so excited about Twitter. After several months of complaining that social networking sites in Venezuela were dominated by opponents of his socialist government, he decided ‘if you can’t beat ‘em, join em’ and opened his own account. In two days, had had 106,000 followers.
“The potential this has … it’s not capitalist, it’s not socialist, it depends on how it is used,” Chavez said after posting two messages on his page @chavezcandanga. (”Candanga” translates locally as a rebellious or strong-willed person.)
Reuters tells us that many Venezuelans laughed when Chavez announced he would join Twitter, wondering how their famously verbose leader, who speaks almost daily for hours on end, will keep to the service’s 140-character limit.
On Mashable they explained that Chavez’s arrival on Twitter was “a surprise, in one part because only 30% of his country has Internet access (though that figure is far higher than it was before he took office) and in another because he raised concerns about Twitter just two months ago, calling it a potential ‘tool of terror.’”
All any of us can do is participate, then wait and see how the world changes as more and more of the world learns to make use of internet speed.