The Outsider (Outsider #1) ✔️

Chapter 65 : Social Media

While the news media was trying to catch information on the complaint filed by Dusk Hale, Social Media, was abuzz with a news of a different kind.

Dusk Hale's Social Media accounts were now followed by more than 25,000 people. Young People, Students, Military Freshers where the three largest segments, but she had many older women, mostly non-working wives looking for interesting news. And practically every newsperson in the country following her social media accounts.

Many of them noticed that morning, that Dusk Hale had followed a new person and welcomed her 'Young Sister' into the social media. Naturally, many of them went and checked the account. And after that the social media servers almost crashed...

The new account was of "16-year-old College Fresher Student in Regis – Princess Catherine Lidwig".

Catherine was the youngest of the Royal Family visible to the public, and quite popular with the youth of the kingdom. She was pretty camera shy and therefore not much seen in the news media. However, whenever she was on the news, everyone tuned into the channels and the load of the news sites increased sharply.

On the previous day, the news media and social media were abuzz with news of her escapades starting from being seen at the airport with Dusk Hale. That followed pics and videos of her being circulated non-stop for the entire evening and live streamed from the Emperor's Ball. It was the first time the media had seen her at a public social event.

But Princess Catherine Lidwig did not have a social media presence at all. Neither did any other member of the Royal Family. Only the Ministers had their official social media IDs that were used for boring announcements from time to time.

That was the case, at least, till that morning.

The news that Princess Catherine Lidwig had created a social media account went viral. Her account was on Image and Video sharing site called 'Pictorial', which was exceedingly popular among students and among the youth. Recently, egged on by the children, even the grandparent's generation had started using it.

An hour later, while the social media was afire with news that 'someone had created a Princess Catherine Pictorial account', the account moved from a normal white to a Pink bordered account. That means that the Tech Company which ran Pictorial, had verified and confirmed that the account was genuine – Officially created by the Princess.

Ten minutes later, Pictoral's servers crashed due to the load of visitors on site. It took the company by surprise and they struggled for half an hour to get it up and running, scrambling around for resources to increase server capacity.

Dusk and Catherine sat an office inside the Imperial Secretariate. Dusk watched in fascination as the number of followers Catherine had, rapidly increased and surpassed her. In the past, Dusk's followers were in mere hundreds and had increased to a few thousand when she came to Uni-Viva and became famous / infamous at the campus gate and the Micro-Mega Party. Then in the last 2 days it had increased to over 10,000. She had no idea when it crossed 20,000.

But in an hour, Catherine had 100,000 followers and by the time they were got lunch delivered to them, she had half a million followers on Pictorial.

The Social Media team of the Imperial Government was handling Catharine's account. A team was assigned by Paul Hunter, Head of Social Media Management for the Imperial Government. They put images of her at the Dress Shop, then when she came out of the Hair Parlour and the images of the Emperor's Ball, as well as images of her with Dusk Hale. Within an hour of the images going up, she had close to 1 million followers on Pictorial. Analysis of the followers showed that quite a few followers were from outside Bravadia.