Former US intelligence contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden joined Twitter today, picking up more than 250,000 followers on the social network in just over two hours.
Mr Snowden followed a single Twitter account: the US National Security Agency, from which he stole electronic documents revealing the agency's secret surveillance programmes.
"Can you hear me now?" he asked in his first tweet, which was quickly resent by Twitter users tens of thousands of times.
Can you hear me now?
— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) September 29, 2015
In his second, Mr Snowden noted the recent news about the planet Mars and then quipped about the difficulty he had finding asylum after the US government fingered him as the source of the NSA leaks.
"And now we have water on Mars!" he wrote.
"Do you think they check passports at the border? Asking for a friend."
Mr Snowden has been living in exile in Russia since June 2013.
The US government has charged Mr Snowden with espionage and theft of government property, crimes for which he could be imprisoned for 30 years if found guilty.
Mr Snowden's Twitter account, @Snowden, has been certified by the San Francisco-based company, which has more than 300 million active users worldwide.
"I used to work for the government. Now I work for the public," Mr Snowden said in his Twitter profile, which identifies him as a board member of the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
The authenticity of the account was also verified by The Intercept, the online newspaper run by investigative reporter Glenn Greenwald, who won a Pulitzer for articles published in The Guardian based on documents provided by Mr Snowden.
Mr Snowden will write and manage his own account, his lawyer, Ben Wizner, told The Intercept.
Twitter may expand 140-character limit - report
Twitter is working on a new product that will allow users to share tweets longer than 140 characters, technology website Re/code has reported.
The company's executives are also discussing changes to how the character limit is measured, such as excluding links and user handles from the count, the website reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
The move comes at a time when Twitter, under the stewardship of co-founder Jack Dorsey, is working hard to rekindle user growth.
Twitter's second-quarter monthly average users grew at the slowest pace since the company went public in 2013.
Several users and designers have expressed concerns as to whether Twitter should ditch its signature character limit to better compete with Facebook, where there is no limit on the length of the posts.
It is unclear what Twitter's new product will look like, Re/code said.
A Twitter spokeswoman declined to comment.
The company has been working on ways to make its service easier to use and entice people to spend more time with it.
It has already removed the 140-character limit from its direct messages and announced plans to let users buy goods and make political donations through tweets.
Increasing the character limit has been discussed at Twitter for years, more so in recent months under Mr Dorsey, sources told Re/code.
Twitter shares were up 1.1% at $25.53 (€22.69) in afternoon trading on the New York Stock Exchange.
Up to yesterday’s close, the stock had fallen nearly 30% this year.
