“With a little bit of creativity, you actually can go far beyond your borders,” says Toomas Hendrik Ilves, Estonia’s Twitter-obsessed president. The world is taking notice.
Photograph by Jason Bergman for BuzzFeed
For a sitting head of state, Toomas Hendrik Ilves spends an awful lot of time on the internet. Most world leaders leave their online presence to aides, punctuated only by the occasional initialized platitude. The president of Estonia, however, spends hours a day reading, writing, and tweeting to his nearly 17,000 followers about issues ranging from European Union border controls to the latest Thomas Pynchon novel.
That follower count may seem modest: Barack Obama is just shy of 37 million. But what's remarkable is that, unique among world leaders, Ilves really gets it. His account is not just a public relations tool. It's really him there touting Estonia's buoyant startup scene; warning of Russia's aggressive policies toward its former satellite states in Eastern Europe; and rebuking people who put his country down. Not bad for the head of a tiny Baltic state of 1.3 million with little in the way of executive power (most of which is concentrated in the prime minister's office).
"That's sort of how I thought of being a president: talking about things," Ilves told BuzzFeed in a midtown New York hotel on the eve of the United Nations General Assembly. "Since I've been writing about things my entire life, I thought, well, that's what I would do as a president, is to read and then write and talk about things that are interesting to me."
Ilves, 59, is equal parts Old World intellectual and 21st-century tech maven, wearing a bow tie and casually quoting Alexander Pope while discussing the finer points of geopolitics and data systems. In his mind, it all fits together. "There was a period in my life when I was very young that I wrote a sonnet a day just to learn concision in writing," he says. "If you think about it, a sonnet is 14 lines of 10 syllables, so your Twitter is one degree lower: It's not 140 syllables, which a sonnet is, it's 140 characters, so that requires even greater concision."
Nor is he a stranger to an old-fashioned intellectual mudfight. Ilves doesn't suffer fools: His mission on Twitter is in no small part to combat ignorance and inaccuracy when it comes to his country. "I keep reading things," he says, "where I think, My God, why don't you perhaps look into what you're talking about instead of spouting off the top of your head!" Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman found that out last year when he wrote a 66-word New York Times blog post belittling Estonia's austerity program, asking, "is this what passes for economic triumph?" Ilves took personal offense, which he expressed in an extraordinary series of tweets:
