As Wagner Group troops pushed towards Moscow, Twitter owner Elon Musk boosted a tweet with unconfirmed information about Russian President Vladimir Putin fleeing to his 144.9 million followers.
“Best coverage of the situation I’ve seen so far is from Mario,” he wrote approvingly.
The tweet was from Mario Nawfal, a serial entrepreneur and citizen journalist who has a surprising connection to Australia.
The 29-year-old’s tweets and streamed audio broadcasts dominated Twitter’s online coverage of last weekend’s mutiny in Russia. Before that, he was providing marathon coverage of the Titan submersible situation. And even earlier in the week? One of his tweets about Meta’s Twitter clone prompted Musk to challenge Mark Zuckerberg to a fight.
Over the past two days, Nawfal has tweeted 63 times and hosted close to 30 hours of Twitter Spaces — a live audio broadcast that works like online talkback radio — into which 18 million people tuned in. His tweets mostly aggregate content from other sources like Wagner’s Telegram or other people’s reporting. During this time he gained more than 300,000 Twitter followers.
Nawfal said his approach to citizen journalism is to get a balance of information, share the source of it, and remain objective. In response to a question about how he vets information that he spreads to millions — like the unproven claim Putin left Russia, which is based on flight tracking of a private jet — he said it depends on the source.
“We have a few sources we know to trust, and when we use sources that we don’t know, we always mention clearly that what we’re saying was not yet verified,” he told Crikey in a message. “We allow the audience to decide.”
Nawfal has a connection to Australia. The Dubai-based business and journalism dilettante grew up and studied in Australia, completing a banking and finance degree at Monash University. In 2012, Nawfal founded an online kitchen appliance company, Froothie Australia. By his telling, he went from selling blenders door to door to making $1 million and then $10 million in revenue in the first two years of operation.
The company has had its bumps, too. In 2015, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commissioner ordered Froothie Australia to pay a $10,800 false or misleading pricing penalty for wrongly claiming that its Optimum 9400 blender had been marked down on sale. In 2017, the ill-fated Silicon Valley startup Juicero launched proceedings against Froothie’s American arm for its role in importing an allegedly patent-infringing blender (the lawsuit never eventuated as Juicero went bust).
Nawfal left the company but told Crikey he’s still the company’s 100% shareholder. Since then, he’s gone on to launch a handful of other companies, including his most recent venture, International Blockchain Consulting.
Meanwhile, he became enamoured with hosting live audio discussions branded as citizen journalism. His Roundtable Show became an early hit on the Clubhouse app until he was suspended (“caught in the crossfire of jealousy, envy and cancel culture”, one interviewer claimed). But since moving to Twitter’s more recently launched Spaces functions, Nawfal’s crypto-focused broadcasts have attracted guests including Musk, Hunter Biden and Rudy Giuliani.
Hopping from topic to topic, he’s become one of the soldiers in Musk’s own battle with mainstream media, which has seen news outlets stripped of verification in favour of anyone who’s willing to pay (including Australian neo-Nazis). And it’s a role that Nawfal has taken on with relish.
“Yesterday started with an attempted coup in Russia and ended with a coup on mainstream media”, Nawfal tweeted to his 904,000 followers.
