Memphis, Tennessee, is a city with an outdated past. A heartland 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 came as a surprise when Twitter decided to ban the city from its website.
This past weekend, users of the social network discovered that it was just enough to tweet the word “Memphis” to validate them with an automatic twelve-hour suspension, and a requirement to remove the tweet.
According to the moderation messages, it breaks Twitter’s rules about the distribution of personal information – and to be honest with the website, Memphis is the home address of more than 600,000 people, although most postal services are more specific to deliver a letter.
A Twitter spokesperson confirmed that the blocks were a bug. “Earlier today, there was a system issue that affected accounts, tweeting the word ‘Memphis,'” the company said in a statement.
‘The issue incorrectly prompted account owners to delete those tweets and temporarily restrict their account features. The relevant accounts are now being re-established and this issue has been resolved. ”
In the meantime, the news of the ban is spreading in the social network through whispers and allusions. References to “the M-word” and “M ******” were common, as users reacted with horror when unsuspecting observers saw what was wrong with saying “Memphis” before being immediately banned again. .
It’s really weird how you just spend an hour not spending the word “Memphis” so fast, you interpret the word as some kind of obscene quality or form in your mind. I can now say the word “Memphis!” Understood as a scramble, for example to receive bad news
– mcc (@ mcclure111) 14 March 2021
Twitter did not explain why Memphis was blocked, but some users speculated that an attempt to prevent a specific user’s personal information from being shared was entered incorrectly. “What is possible is that a Twitter employee tried to block a street address, but the post syntax acted as an escape sequence, or the original was multi-line and they just pasted the city,” wrote Swift on Security.
However, the company has a history of accidentally going a bit further than intended. Notoriously, Jack Dorsey himself, co-founder and CEO of Twitter temporarily banned from the site in 2016, due to “an internal error”.
In 2018, Dorsey apologizes for filtering 600,000 accounts “unfairly” from the search results, using a so-called “shadowban” on the users, which includes members of Congress, based on the behavior of the accounts they follow. “We decided it was not fair, and corrected,” Dorsey said at the time.