Pope draws hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers
Pope Benedict XVI already had hundreds of thousands of followers on
his new Twitter account on Tuesday -- just a day after it was unveiled
and more than a week before any actual tweets appear.
The English-language version of the @pontifex handle had more than
365,000 followers -- up from 2,400 at the time of the announcement on
Monday.
Counting all the eight languages of the accounts on which
papally-approved tweets will appear, the number of followers was more
than 500,000.
The numbers still represent only a tiny fraction of the world's 1.1
billion Catholics who follow the pope offline and are far lower than for
celebrity singers Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber who each have over 31
million followers. The pope's first tweet will appear in English on
December 12.
"I'm not surprised there has been such a strong response," Vatican
spokesman Federico Lombardi said, adding that the initiative had given
"a signal of the ability of the Pope and his collaborators to respond to
expectations. "Obviously being a person of a certain age and like other
people of a certain age he is not a digital native and will therefore
use social networks differently from youngsters but he understands their
potential," Lombardi said.
The 85-year-old German pope is a published theologian under his name
Joseph Ratzinger and has just completed a trilogy about the life of
Jesus Christ -- drafts of which he wrote by hand before they were typed
up by aides.
AFP
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