Here’s an interesting one for your #FollowFriday.
Convicted Wikileaks leaker Chelsea Manning, formerly known as Bradley Manning, is now on Twitter.
She first tweeted around noon on Friday, and has since published a handful of tweets. According to Manning, she plans to tweet on a regular basis – daily if possible. “Tweeting from prison reqs a lot of effort and using a voice phone to dictate #90sproblems,” she wrote.
Check out her tweets:
This is my new twitter account =P
— Chelsea Manning (@xychelsea) April 3, 2015
I’m hoping to stay connected w/ this account as much as poss., but would rather tweet about more meaningful things than not #lessismore
— Chelsea Manning (@xychelsea) April 3, 2015
Tweeting from prison reqs a lot of effort and using a voice phone to dictate #90sproblems
— Chelsea Manning (@xychelsea) April 3, 2015
It will be hard, but I don’t want this Twitter feed to be a one-way street/conversation
— Chelsea Manning (@xychelsea) April 3, 2015
Starting with a shout out to the friends who have always stood by me @ggreenwald @amnesty @carwinb @savemanning and so many others #thankyou
— Chelsea Manning (@xychelsea) April 3, 2015
For those of you asking: I plan to tweet as freq. as possible; daily to weekly
— Chelsea Manning (@xychelsea) April 3, 2015
Also for those of you asking: @fitzgibbonmedia is handling my account for the time being
— Chelsea Manning (@xychelsea) April 3, 2015
The Daily Dot confirmed with FitzGibbon Media that it is in fact Chelsea Manning. She’s not allowed a smartphone in jail, of course, so her tweets are coming through FitzGibbon via phone.
Chelsea Manning recently scored a couple of wins in court. Last month, a court ruled that henceforth, Chelsea Manning must be referred to in female or gender-neutral terms. A few weeks before that, Manning was granted the hormone therapy she’d been requesting since she was locked up.
In August of 2013, Pvt. Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison for supplying WikiLeaks with 700,000 classified documents in 2010. Manning was found guilty on charges under the Espionage Act, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and the code of military justice – but was spared the charge of “aiding the enemy”, the most serious of all the charges. If convicted of that crime, Manning could have faced up the 90 years behind bars.
