Social media brings separated twins together for the first time
2 min read
By MEGAN FLOURNOY
Our generation has known how to utilize social media since we were in middle school, and it has impacted us in more ways than imaginable.
We can check Twitter, where we follow our favorite celebrities and music artists; we can scroll through photos on Instagram and see what our friends have been up to on any given day; and if we are anything like Anais Bordier and Samantha Futerman, we can now find our long lost twin sister.
According to Kelly Wallace from CNN, Bordier received a screen shot from her friend one day of a YouTube video of a girl that looked exactly like her. She did not think much of it, and since she could not figure out the girl’s name in the video, she dropped it.
About a month later, the same friend sent her another screenshot of the same girl, but this time the girl was in a movie trailer. Bordier began to research the girl and soon found out that her and the girl “shared a birthday and were both adopted in South Korea,” Wallace said.
After more investigation, Bordier learned that the girl was in fact her twin sister separated at birth. She built up the courage to send her newfound twin sister, Futerman, a friend request on Facebook and message her. They exchanged a few messages, and then decided to chat on Skype.
They finally arranged to meet in person in London and have been inseparable ever since. Both girls said while sharing their story that it is crazy how much they have in common, even though they grew up thousands of miles apart: Bordier in Paris, France and Futerman in Verona, New Jersey.
Without the social media they had at their fingertips, such as YouTube, Facebook and Skype, these girls may never have learned of one another. Both sets of adoptive parents had no idea that the other twin existed. Similarly, both of the girls’ adoption papers listed a single birth, and did not acknowledge the existence of the other twin at all.
It is true that sometimes our generation can be obsessed with social media, and it can be seen in our parents’ eyes as disturbing, negative to our influences and even dangerous. This story is proof though that social media is not all bad. Used in moderation, it can be life changing, and, for Anais and Samantha, their lives will never be the same.
