Edward Snowden forgot to turn off his Twitter notifications and received 47 gigabytes of emails

Ever open up your inbox and find a bunch of spammy notification emails from some new site or app which will take forever to delete?

Then you might feel bad for Twitter's newest celebrity, NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden.

The former surveillance contractor turned activist joined the social media site on Tuesday.

But for someone so clued up on privacy and data, he made a mistake that has bested many of us - not disabling Twitter's automatic email notifications for basically everything that happens on the site.

Snowden said he got 47 gigabytes' worth of notifications in his inbox.

Snowden joined Twitter at the suggestion of astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson during a podvast interview.

He's clocked up 1.2million followers in just three days, but is only following one account - the NSA's.

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