(1/12) How I fell in love with social media & the EU, and made that my whole career, a thread.
This isn’t TikTok (thankfully), but let’s do a bit of *Storytime* anyway.
I’m Hannah and I’m a social media manager for the EU.
Sometimes I still can’t believe that’s my real job.
Tommi › FOSDEM 🤯 reshared this.
Hannah Grace
in reply to Hannah Grace • • •Hannah Grace
in reply to Hannah Grace • • •Hannah Grace
in reply to Hannah Grace • • •Hannah Grace
in reply to Hannah Grace • • •Hannah Grace
in reply to Hannah Grace • • •Hannah Grace
in reply to Hannah Grace • • •Hannah Grace
in reply to Hannah Grace • • •Hannah Grace
in reply to Hannah Grace • • •Hannah Grace
in reply to Hannah Grace • • •Hannah Grace
in reply to Hannah Grace • • •Hannah Grace
in reply to Hannah Grace • • •(12/12) So that’s it for my little summary on a 10-year social media career in international politics. I like to say it’s a career that grew up with me. If I were a comic book character, this would be my origin story.
PS: My mom does think it’s a real job now.
Back to the top of the thread: eupolicy.social/@hpod16/115957…
Hannah Grace
2026-01-25 20:50:03
Tony Meredith
in reply to Hannah Grace • • •(In a previous generation, my dad as an old-school civil servant doing admin never really grasped my work in politics and policy.)
Hannah Grace
in reply to Tony Meredith • • •Tony Meredith
in reply to Hannah Grace • • •I applaud your career courage!
Tiziano
in reply to Hannah Grace • •like this
Hannah Grace e BrennpunktUA debunked 🕵🏻♀️ like this.
Hannah Grace
in reply to Tiziano • • •Tiziano likes this.
Leander Lindahl
in reply to Hannah Grace • • •thanks for the long nice story. I enjoyed finding out about your path that led you here...
As for me, I've never been much for social media. Didn't know what to do with it. But when intelligence sharing for Ukraine was cut off in March '25 I went completely digital sovereignty fundamentalist. And that included getting a European Mastodon account.
BrennpunktUA debunked 🕵🏻♀️
in reply to Hannah Grace • • •I appreciate your story and honesty very much 🙏
Btw, not sure if you already knew: when you put hashtags at the very end of a post (at least two), Mastodon rearranges them, so that they're not "invasive".
#FediTips #MastodonLearning
everton137
in reply to Hannah Grace • • •Hannah Grace
in reply to everton137 • • •everton137
in reply to Hannah Grace • • •Haha, that's when the internet was fun!
When I quit my particle physics studies in Brazil, I started working on a social network project that used blogs to share scientific and educational knowledge. This took place between 2006 and 2009 at the largest university in South America.
The idea was to create a decentralized social media platform for research and educational centers that could communicate with each other.
That dream was ahead of its time, but today I see it's happening!
At that time, I learned a lot from blogs and early social media. There were great forums with healthy discussions.
I remember making a friend who told me how she came out. She was a biologist, and I was a physicist. It was interesting to learn about the subject, see the emotions behind the screens, and then become friends in real life.
In Brazil, I saw many cases where people used internet forums to realize that there was nothing wrong with being themselves.
maswan
in reply to Hannah Grace • • •Thank you for the long introduction!
I hope you are up for a lot of comments in here then, this is the most conversational social media I have experienced outside of chat services (I grew up on IRC in the late 90s and 00s).
And I've seen a lot of people with Opinions about what the EU should and shouldn't do.
morph
in reply to Hannah Grace • • •BrennpunktUA debunked 🕵🏻♀️
in reply to Hannah Grace • • •have you actually been to #Ukraine? And if yes, how many times?
Me personally (the 1. time) in late 2013, right after visiting 🇵🇱. Crossed the border and visited #Lviv. Had a remote friend there, which I gave a brief visit. Only then started to realize, Maidan protests started in #Kyiv!
It's roughly since then, when I started (or maybe just intensified) fighting 🇷🇺 propaganda, along with the far-right and fossil ones.
Wished I had a chance to visit the southern east of 🇺🇦!
#SlavaUkraini
Hannah Grace
in reply to BrennpunktUA debunked 🕵🏻♀️ • • •I went to a conference in Feb 2013 and made plenty of friends who were later protesting on Maidan Square. Ivano Frankivsk. I went back in 2014 and 2015, for EYP sessions that were actually Belarusian conferences, but since EYP was banned in Belarus, they often held their sessions in Lviv. And then During my master I went for a wedding and to visit a friend in Kyiv. Oh, and to the European Lesbian Conference in 2019, that was wild...
BrennpunktUA debunked 🕵🏻♀️
in reply to Hannah Grace • • •🇺🇦🏳️🌈 Ukraine even held CSDs during wartime, I don't know for the last two years, though. RuZZian attacks continue to intensify each year 💔
I've been back to Ukraine in 2015 and in 2016, both times in Kyiv, 1 time for the job (solar PV) 🌞🔌
In early 2022, our small initiative against right-wing extremism collected money for 5 small camera drones for 🇺🇦. Not much, but all we were able to afford. Yet, at a very early stage. There have been other, much larger drone campaigns, after (not ours).
stu
in reply to Hannah Grace • • •ProScience 🇪🇺
in reply to Hannah Grace • • •"while law-makers buckled up and tightened rules on political advertising. "
Not really, or not really effectively.
Hannah Grace
in reply to ProScience 🇪🇺 • • •By the time the 2019 European Elections came around, you had to have a verified Facebook Profile, and you weren't able to run ads in another country than the one you were physically living in. I know because I was a freelancer for a political party doing just that.
And the rules kept coming: since October last year the EU political advertising regulation is in force: eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-con…
Transparency and targeting of political advertising | EUR-Lex
eur-lex.europa.euProScience 🇪🇺
in reply to Hannah Grace • • •Nice and dandy, but the most important two aspects of any regulation, directive, law, are:
1—How quickly, widely and effectively are they enforced?
2—Are fines and other forms of punishment for violations significant enough to deter the very violations?
Veza85UE
in reply to Hannah Grace • • •BrennpunktUA debunked 🕵🏻♀️
in reply to Hannah Grace • • •Hannah Grace
in reply to BrennpunktUA debunked 🕵🏻♀️ • • •and it's short which was handy for twitter (remember when the max was 140 characters? I used to be a wizard at shortening sentences, because i had to translate 140 character tweets from English to German)
BrennpunktUA debunked 🕵🏻♀️
in reply to Hannah Grace • • •hahaha yes, here it's 500 characters (on most, but not all servers, infosec.exchange allows for 5.000), but I still sometimes try to squeeze as much as possible into it 😁 Reminds me when I started doing this with the old-fashioned SMS.
Or when I used to optimize GIFs to fit 10 or 20 Kilobytes as a youngster (even won an GIF award back then!) 🙈 And I've always been very impressed by the 4kb and the 64kb PC "intros" out there – you do know them, right?
Hannah Grace
in reply to BrennpunktUA debunked 🕵🏻♀️ • • •I like character limits for the same reason I like Sonnets in Poetry.
There's only one strict way to write a sonnet, and yet hundreds of thousands have been written, one more creative than the next.
Maybe 140 characters was too little, but something about being given a limit makes me want to push it. Get the most out of the few characters I have.
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day...?
BrennpunktUA debunked 🕵🏻♀️
in reply to Hannah Grace • • •company
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)stu
in reply to Hannah Grace • • •Hannah Grace
in reply to stu • • •@superuserdo
"To be or not to be, that is the question, whether 'tis nobler
in the mind to suffer
the slings and arrows
of outrageous fortune
or to take arms against
a sea of struggles
and by opposing
- end them"
Or something like that... I should really look it up again.
stu
in reply to Hannah Grace • • •Oelison
in reply to Hannah Grace • • •Hannah Grace
in reply to Oelison • • •GunChleoc
in reply to Hannah Grace • • •@oelschle You self-verify by linking to a website that you control.
Instructions: docs.joinmastodon.org/user/pro…
If these are too difficult, here's another guide by @FediTips fedi.tips/how-do-i-verify-my-a…
How do I verify my account on Mastodon and the Fediverse? | Fedi.Tips – An Unofficial Guide to Mastodon and the Fediverse
fedi.tipsFedi.Tips
in reply to GunChleoc • • •Leander Lindahl
in reply to Hannah Grace • • •you're supposed to add a tag to a webpage named in your profile. joinmastodon.org/verification
But I think the domain you're using is sort of a validation in itself
eupolicy.social/about
I guess maybe @oelschle isn't aware of that.
Verification
joinmastodon.orgHannah Grace
in reply to Leander Lindahl • • •Oelison
in reply to Hannah Grace • • •Sorry. My request maybe overshoot a bit.
Leander Lindahl
in reply to Oelison • • •CC: @lexinova
LΞX/NØVΛ 🇪🇺
in reply to Leander Lindahl • • •Hannah Grace
in reply to LΞX/NØVΛ 🇪🇺 • • •I'll take it, thank youuuuu 💜
Tiziano
in reply to Leander Lindahl • •Hannah Grace
in reply to Tiziano • • •Leander Lindahl
in reply to Hannah Grace • • •Hannah Grace
in reply to Leander Lindahl • • •Is there some way to see what the most popular posts on Mastodon are in a given week?
Asking because of the EU account, not my personal one. 💜
Leander Lindahl
in reply to Hannah Grace • • •There's @murmel_social and @topstories but I think that's per 24h, not week.
GunChleoc
in reply to Leander Lindahl • • •@leanderlindahl @tizianomattei @oelschle I don't think anybody is keeping per week stats. You could program a Python script and poll a few servers' trending pages and accumulate into a database (What's trending also depends on the server, because servers don't see the complete Fediverse). mastodonpy.readthedocs.io/en/s…
For Hashtag trends, there's also fedi.buzz/
For trending links, there's @trending
FediBuzz
fedi.buzzTiziano
in reply to Hannah Grace • •I know there's a "trending" feed, but it's not weekly.
The right person to tag is probably the admin of your instance.
(I'm not on Mastodon btw, as you may notice -- I'm on Friendica. Fediverse power in action) 😎
like this
GunChleoc, Leander Lindahl e BrennpunktUA debunked 🕵🏻♀️ like this.
Tiziano
in reply to Hannah Grace • •There are some stats you may find interesting here, though I'm not sure you'll find what you're looking for: fedidb.com
@Oelison @Leander Lindahl
Hannah Grace likes this.
Hannah Grace
in reply to Tiziano • • •Thanks, I'm adding this to my "knowledge about the fediverse" collection
Tiziano likes this.
Tiziano
in reply to Leander Lindahl • •Yeah, but the word seemed to me too "corporate" to be serious... but of course IDK
@Oelison @Hannah Grace
Tiziano
in reply to Hannah Grace • •😅
(and I hope you're here to stay)
@Oelison @Leander Lindahl
like this
Oelison e BrennpunktUA debunked 🕵🏻♀️ like this.
zotheca
in reply to Oelison • • •@oelschle
Isn't eupolicy.social enough verification?
@hpod16
Hannah Grace
in reply to zotheca • • •zotheca
in reply to Hannah Grace • • •Thank you. But there is written „for people working in areas that are (at least loosely) related to EU policy“. Otherwise, it would of course be difficult, because the instance gives the impression of being official.
@oelschle
Jill
in reply to zotheca • • •zotheca
in reply to Jill • • •@jill
It is misleading.
@hpod16 @oelschle
Hannah Grace
in reply to zotheca • • •Sorry if it appears misleading! My profile also states I'm here in 💜 personal capacity💜
so, just a person who works for the EU, in no way to I speak for them
(That's what spokespeople do, that's not what I am)
Tiziano likes this.
zotheca
in reply to Hannah Grace • • •@jill @oelschle
No, it's not your account that's misleading, but the self-presentation of the instance.
Jill
in reply to Hannah Grace • • •stu
in reply to Hannah Grace • • •Sandor Spruit 🇪🇺🇳🇱🇺🇦🇨🇦
in reply to Hannah Grace • • •Hannah Grace
in reply to Sandor Spruit 🇪🇺🇳🇱🇺🇦🇨🇦 • • •Stein Arne Brekke
in reply to Hannah Grace • • •