Memphis, Tennessee, is a city with a historical past. A center of rock’n’roll, blues, gospel and country music, it is home to Graceland and FedEx, and a cornerstone of the civil rights movement. So it was a surprise when Twitter decided to ban the city from its site.
Over the weekend, social media users discovered that simply tweeting the word “Memphis” was enough to land them with a 12-hour auto-suspension and a requirement to remove it.
According to moderation posts, doing so violated Twitter’s rules on the dissemination of personal information, and to be fair to the site, Memphis is the home address of more than 600,000 people, although most Postal carriers require more specificity to deliver a letter.
A Twitter spokesman confirmed that the blogs were a mistake. “Earlier today, there was a system issue affecting accounts that tweeted the word‘ Memphis, ’” the company said in a statement.
“The problem incorrectly requested that account owners delete these tweets and temporarily limit account functions. Now the affected accounts have been reset and this issue has been resolved.”
Meanwhile, news of the ban spread through the social network through whispers and allusions. References to “the word M” and “M ******” were common, as users reacted horrified to see unsuspecting observers wondering what to say about “Memphis” before receiving a ban in turn. .
mcc
(@ mcclure111)It’s really weird that spending an hour without stopping saying the word “Memphis” causes you to interpret the word with an obscene form or quality in mind. Now I can understand with the word “Memphis!” as a cuss, for example on receiving bad news
Twitter did not explain why Memphis was blocked, but some users speculated that an attempt was incorrectly entered to prevent a specific user’s personal information from being shared. “What is possible is that a Twitter member tried to block a postal address, but the postal syntax acted as an escape sequence or the original was multiline and only stuck to the city.” Swift wrote about security.
However, the company has a history of accidental moderation a little beyond expectations. Notoriously, Jack Dorsey himself, co-founder and CEO of Twitter, was banned from the site temporarily in 2016, due to an “internal error”.
In 2018, Dorsey apologized for “unfairly” leaking 600,000 accounts from the search results, applying the so-called “shadowban” to users, which included members of Congress, based on the behavior of the accounts that followed them. “We decided it wasn’t fair and we corrected it,” Dorsey said at the time.