Bana Alabed is a 7 year old girl living in Eastern Aleppo. Over the past few months, she hs been tweeting from the Twitter handle bellow about the horrors she's experienced in her city. Bana has amassed a 288,000 account following on Twitter, and her tweets, photos, and videos are regularly posted on Western media outlets. She was notably profiled by Nick Kristoff of the New York Times. After intial exposure to the media, @AlabedBana was the subject of a mvariety of news reports, documentary segments and Skype interviews. Bana is know as the Syria's modern day Anne Frank, using Twitter as her medium. Others have expressed skepticism, and have tried to falsify Bana's account of the war, dismissing it as mere propaganda that cannot have come from a seven year-old girl in Aleppo. Recently, bellingcat, an online citizen-journalist crowdsourcing website wrote an entire report locating Bana's home and neighborhood in Aleppo, to prove that she exists. Bana's twitter is a very interesting phenomenon, it represents the adaptation of war memoir or journalism to the techniques of advertising and promotion. It packages the entire experience of war into 140 character tweets, spoken from the perspective a despairing seven year old girl and her family.
Promotion is the most thick-skinned parasite of our culture. But it is also like a biological function: it devours our substance, but it also allows us to metabolize what we absorb, like a parasitic plant or intestinal flora, it allows us to turn the world and the violence of the world into a consumable substance. So, war or promotion?
Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, p32