Twinster Project

Hi!

  So I know this blog is supposed to be about gender stereotype and how the media is setting society back instead of helping us move forward. But this time let us take a break from all the heavy topics and let me tell a story I read that’s simply too unbelievable to not share with everyone. It still involves social media so I guess I didn’t go too far off track, but please forgive this time since I’m siding with the enemy.

  When I was little one of my favorite movies ever was Lindsay Lohan’s The Parent Trap. The tale of a pair of identical twins, separated at birth, that reunited at a summer camp and went on a quest to bring the family back together. The story was so incredible but apparently it is not as far-fetched as I thought. Last month, two girls experienced a similar story in real life thanks to the power of social media.

  Samantha Futerman is a young woman from Verona, New Jersey currently living in LA to pursue an acting career.  She was born in South Korean in November 1987 and adopted by an American family of 4 shortly after.  She grew up not knowing anything about her biological family until a Facebook message changed her life. One day she received a private Facebook message from a girl named Anais Bordier living in London, England that basically sums up to: “Hey, my friend saw you in a YouTube video and said we look exactly the same so I searched you up a little bit. I was adopted too, we have the same birthday, born in the same city, do you think we could be twins?”. And when Samantha went to Anais’s Facebook she described it as, “I saw only my own face staring back from her profile picture”. 

   After reading about this story online I immediately went to Samantha’s YouTube channel and watched the video of Samantha and Anais’s first skype call and therefore their first time seeing each other in motion.  The video gave me goose bumps and I felt their excitement and their fear of the uncertainties and future.  It was like watching the Parent Trap all over again except this time it’s real and these girls could possibly be meeting their blood relative for the first time in their lives. I was moved by the story and was again shocked by what a powerful tool Social Media could be.  Social Media has connected the world together and now the six degrees of separation seems more real than ever.  These girls found each other through YouTube and Facebook and that has now changed their lives forever. 

  They have further integrated social media to start a Kickstarter project called Twinsters in order to raise money to film a documentary that follows them through the first time they meet to when they take DNA test to confirm their relationship. The project will cover all cost from production of the film to plane tickets. And in less than a month people from around the world have already donated more than $35,000 dollars. 

  They found each other and told their story through social media, and now have been given an opportunity to meet in person for the first time thanks to this powerful tool as well.  This story showed me that social media is not trying to move us back, people who use it in the wrong ways are.  If we could all utilize it for the benefit of others, it can really bring the world closer together.