What he broadcasts may well represent the ultimate in fake news, but that does not stop more than 70,000 people following a Port Elizabeth tweleb as he spins tale after unbelievable tale.
The Motherwell-based tweleb, who uses the moniker Taka Tina, has already made a name for himself through his comic tweets – and this in only two months.
His outrageous tweets are about his supposed day-to-day encounters – with images to go with them – but have little or no bearing on the truth.
One particular tweet which saw him rise to fame overnight was about a soldier returning home only to find his wife cheating.
“This happened earlier today in Port Elizabeth Motherwell NU29. A guy who is a soldier came back home for holidays to find his wife in bed with another guy. He tied them up in bed & put a bomb between them. One body was found 4 streets away.”
The tweet was accompanied by an image of a building with only half a roof.
Taka Tina’s current following is 74,100 and between Thursday and Friday this week it increased by 4,000.
He recently tweeted about his paramedic friend who spoilt his Monday mood: “Tragic news on a Monday morning kills your weekly mood. Friend of mine works at a funeral home – last night he crashed into an oncoming taxi while transporting 8 corpses from Grahamstown to PE, 4 bodies were badly injured, 2 died again, 2 were rushed to livingston Hospital.”
Taka Tina said he tweeted in his spare time as he was a working family man.
“I don’t really like journalists, they give me the creeps,” he said. “That’s why it took a while for me to agree to the interview.”
But attempting to interview Taka Tina is just as peculiar as his social media graffiti.
How do we know he’s telling the truth?
And is that really his picture he supplied us with?
“I work for a well-respected food manufacturing brand in South Africa, and it’s very important for me to protect my identity,” he explained.
But Taka Tina said his twitter character was separate from who he was in reality.
“My tweets come to me, I’ve got this crazy world I created in my imagination and I find it therapeutic because I spend most of the time laughing such that [I momentarily] forget about what I can’t change in my world,” Taka Tina says.
“I tweet about it with the hope of making someone out there laugh and forget about [what] they are going through for a while.
“And I think it’s helping, judging from the feedback I get every day from people who find my TL therapeutic.
“I’m just a regular guy,” the former pupil of Ncedo High School in Mothewell, and father to a 13-year-old daughter, said.
“She’s also just like me – a great sense of humour. And I’d say she's my inspiration because she likes my jokes a lot – she even asks me to tease her mother,” he said.
“I consider myself to be an introvert regardless of the hype around my character. I love comedy, of course – anything that will make me laugh.”
Taka Tina said that at school he used to be the guy who would stand in front of the class and make everyone laugh.
“The same applies at home, at work and around my friends.
“Friends sometimes would invite me to a party just so I could spice it up.”
On his view of the future, he said he had long-term goals “but sometimes the wind has a tendency of changing your direction”.
“In this lifetime you’ve got to expect anything.
“I take it as it is – I’m always ready for anything and nothing can bring me down.
“But on a serious note, we as the youth of today are not given enough chance to show the world what we can do.
“SA has the most talented youth but we are denied a chance by those in charge to . . . show what we are capable of.
“You can have all the talent in the world but don’t have enough money to make it to auditions.”
Taka Tina said he was also busy writing two novels.
“I’d say I took after my father who is a great scriptwriter.
“He wrote some very interesting books and scripts which I believe can do better than most SA movies I’ve watched. But unfortunately they are just gathering dust on his shelves.”
Dust doesn’t have time to settle on Taka Tina’s tweets.
And even if it did, would we believe him?