It’s been nearly two months since Chelsea Manning was after her sentence was commuted by outgoing US President Barack Obama.
It’s also been nearly two months since Manning opened her own Twitter account—and she’s quickly become an enthusiastic user of the social media platform.
The prolific Tweeter regularly posts photos of herself and writes cheerful updates about her new life, after having spent seven years in a US military prison for passing classified information to WikiLeaks.
Manning currently has just over 250,000 followers on Twitter and while many are fierce supporters of her—she’s also had to deal with a number of transphobic comments.
After tweeting that rich people should pay more taxes, Manning had to deal with Twitter users accusing her of wasting tax payer money on her gender reassignment surgery.
Source: Twitter/@xychelsea
Source: Twitter
Manning replies in an upbeat way to comments that can often be pretty dark, saying she never blocks or even mutes anyone on Twitter.
In her since being released from prison, Manning said she didn't see herself as a public figure, despite her hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers.
Source: Twitter/@xychelsea
Source: Twitter/@xychelsea
“I don't see it as celebrity,” she said, “It’s just what I was doing on social media as a teenager, just scaled up by several orders of magnitude.”
She added that she always tries to keep an open mind when dealing with trolls online.
“I just remember that...sometimes people have reasons of doing that that have nothing to do with the content. It's just, like, a part of...their needs to be heard in the world and to have a connection to people, even if it's negative.”
