Brussels finds humor amid online clamor

At a meeting shortly after my arrival in Brussels months ago, I asked a veteran colleague what social apps people use here, in this city, this country, and this continent.

"X — and we still prefer to call it by the old name Twitter," he said firmly. "But be prepared: it's highly political, and contains mostly serious topics with serious arguments."

He was absolutely right. The moment I logged back into my account, abandoned for years, I found today's X had already evolved into a battleground of arguments, quarrels, and, quite often, outright profanity between people holding opposing views.

Democrats and Republicans in the US, for example, blame each other as if they could no longer afford to live under the same roof.

Even when someone posts a photo of plastic waste floating in the sea and calls for environmental protection, the comment section somehow turns into a sarcasm Olympics, complete with people posting pictures of caps still attached to bottles after being opened, only to meet European legal requirements. They mean to accuse European lawmakers of wasting taxpayers' money on such small things.

I know the platform is no longer what it was when I first registered back in 2012, and the once relaxed, friendly atmosphere has become something of a luxury. Still, I figured I could choose to remain myself, to remain a humorous, optimistic, good and real person.

So I began sharing slices of my daily life. And very quickly, I realized that people are actually quite willing to relax a little in this shared virtual space. After a whole day's work, everybody wants to loosen their tightly wound nerves and help shape a kind of community in which humor, rather than bad temper, plays a meaningful role.

My very first post in Europe on my account @zzxang86 was a casual snapshot of a roadside dog toilet. I asked, quite sincerely, why dogs in Europe have dedicated public toilets, while humans don't enjoy the same privilege?

That post received 46 likes and 20 comments. Tourists and locals alike joked beneath it, with some claiming animals are treated better than humans here and others sharing photos of dog school buses, a service conspicuously absent from primary schools. People were complaining, but at least under my post, not with resentment. It was all delivered in a playful, self-mocking tone.

Encouraged, I let myself go a little.

When a post invited users to share their photos, I uploaded one of myself interviewing a Napoleon Bonaparte impersonator, and asked, "Can you tell which one is me?"

When someone asked what valuable things we often overlook, I posted a picture of Earth and wrote, "It took 4.6 billion years for this muddy ball to form, yet people are trying to ruin it every day."

Through the screen, I could almost hear the laughter from the 30-plus likes and comments.

Then came the day someone asked us to "say something nice about the UK". I wrote, "We love UK food," and attached a cartoon of the notorious Stargazy Pie. But just before hitting "post", I changed my mind. Almost out of instinct, I added a small note in brackets: (sponsored tweet).

The comment section went wild, with people posting "sponsored reply", "sponsored blame", "sponsored Stargazy Pie" everywhere.

Through moments like these, I've made friends online with people I've never met in person, yet I could chat with them for half an hour without the slightest fatigue. This, I suppose, is the charm of X as a real-time, short-message platform: immediacy ensures your message reaches its audience almost instantly, while the 280-character limit forces you to cut the fluff and say what matters, thus saving everyone time and energy.

Maintaining humor under such constraints is no easy task. It tests one's command of language and filters for genuinely interesting souls. With just a few words, readers can often sense whether the person behind the screen is worth following or engaging with at all.

Everybody wants to talk to an interesting soul and a Twitter player had better be one.

Of course, humor is only one approach. On X, one must also stand firm when necessary. The platform hosts countless institutional accounts, and nearly every Western political leader or lawmaker maintains a presence. At times, it becomes necessary to push back against clearly inappropriate claims.

Just a few days ago, a Japanese father living in the UK complained that his daughter had learned about the Nanjing Massacre at school. He dismissed it as "Chinese propaganda" and expressed concern.

I quickly found a historical newspaper clipping — once proudly published by Japanese media — documenting two Japanese officers competing in a killing contest in China. I posted it in his comment section and asked: "Is this also 'Chinese propaganda'?"

He did not reply. We neither expected nor needed his reply, because by posting the newspaper clipping, we had already won and his biases won't stand.

Some will undoubtedly continue to deny. But as long as the evidence is there, as solid as one's chair, people will see it. And more importantly, more people will understand.

That's the charm of X, as everybody can share their thoughts here. A firm stance with a humorous nature will always have an audience, and what X can do is offer a channel for them to reach that audience.

Which job did X do much better than today? The atmosphere is being poisoned, and people are using harsh words and dividing themselves not based on logic but into camps. Whether that can be fixed requires the efforts of all participants, including me.

The author is chief correspondent at China Daily EU Bureau based in Brussels.