It's time for an epilepsy Twitter revolution.

Twitter is an online social networking service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, otherwise known as “tweets.” The website was created in March of 2006 and launched in July of that year. It has gained worldwide popularity with nearly 400 million users as of 2011, generating more than 200 million tweets and handling over 1.6 billion search queries a day [1]. Twitter has seen exponential growth and is now ranked as one of the 10 most visited websites worldwide for daily Web traffic. Because of Twitter's vast reach, it has influenced culture and geopolitical issues. Twitter was instrumental in a number of revolutions, including the 2011 Egyptian revolution, the 2010–2011 Tunisian protest, the 2000–2010 Iranian election protest, and the 2009 Moldova civil unrest [2]. Therefore, no one should doubt Twitter's ability to shape one's perceptions on a condition such as epilepsy. In this issue of Epilepsy & Behavior, Dr. McNeill and colleagues from the Dalhousie University Health Centre in Halifax, NS, Canada, provide a brief snapshot of epilepsy's portrayal on Twitter [3]. The investigators analyzed 1720 tweets, originally collected over a 48-hour period, containing the word seizure (s) to establish a classification system for the tweets. Then, they reviewed 10,662 tweets originally collected over a 7-day period in April 2011. The Twitter search for seizure yielded 6706 results, whereas the search for seizures produced 3956 tweets. Predominant categories of epilepsy and seizure tweets were metaphors (32%), personal accounts (31%), informative tweets (12%), and tweets related to ridicule and/or joking about the condition (9%). The authors found that almost 41% of seizure-related tweets were derogatory in nature. The researchers concluded that although Twitter has the power to positively affect how epilepsy and seizures are perceived, instead an epilepsy stigma is being perpetuated. They argued that a better job needs to be done to alter the perception of seizures and epilepsy on the social media site. This study highlights that epilepsy perception is not faring well in social media. It underscores the importance of altering the stigma of epilepsy, one of the most important psychosocial consequences of the disease. The only previously published study on epilepsy and the Internet included analyses of YouTube videos, as well as Internet search engine sites [4]. This study is consonant in pointing out that a considerable amount of stigma, ridicule, or negative aspects of the condition is continually emphasized throughout the Internet. It is now time for the epilepsy community to rise up, have our own Twitter revolution, and alter the way the condition is perceived. There is too much suffering and too great a burden for this to go unchecked. Given that patients with seizures are often dependent, Twitter can level the playing field as long as there is Internet access; no driver's license is required. By taking charge, we can potentially change the equation and allow the silent voices of individuals with epilepsy to rise up, revolt, and finally correct the misperceptions and eliminate the stigma associated with the condition once and for all.