Edward Snowden has gained more than 1.25 million followers since joining Twitter earlier this week, and the social networking site has made sure he’s aware of it. After failing to adjust the settings for his Twitter account, Mr. Snowden said he received dozens of gigabytes worth of alerts in his inbox.
“I forgot to turn off notifications,” the former National Security Agency contractor tweeted on Thursday.
As a result, Mr. Snowden said that the email address he linked to his account received a message from Twitter each time he was retweeted, messaged, earned a new follower or had one of his posts designated as a favorite.
Since launching his @Snowden account on Tuesday, the ex-intelligence analyst said he received 47 gigabytes of emails from Twitter — or roughly the same amount of information that can be contained on 10 DVDs.
For comparison, Google users are given 15 GB of storage space by default when they register a free Gmail account. According to Mr. Snowden, he would have reached capacity on three of those in just as many days.
“#Lessonlearned,” he tweeted.
The former NSA contractor joined the social networking site on Tuesday and received more than 1 million followers during his first 24 hours on Twitter. He’s only authored a handful of public posts in the days since, and as of Friday only follows one other account — that of his former employer, @NSAGov.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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