Due to a bizarre bug, the bird’s website is temporarily banning people for tweeting the word “Memphis”. On Sunday, several Twitter users they suddenly found their accounts blocked for 12 hours, apparently just by saying the word – me included.
What Twitter has against Tennessee’s second largest city is anyone’s guess. Maybe they just aren’t big Elvis fans? Who knows.
Several users shared screenshots of the suspension alerts they received Sunday, claiming that the word that caused the problem was “Memphis”. Many discovered the bug after sharing a photo of the Dutch professional soccer player Memphis Depay, the Independent reports. In apparent reference to this, the official English account for the French football club Olympique Lyonnais tweeted a photo Depay along with the message “can we talk about it yet?” and tagged Twitter. Tennessee’s basketball team, Memphis Grizzlies, also showed up to scream a tweet referencing “the word m” on Sunday.
A user shared a supposed screenshot of a response from Twitter Support calling the problem “a bug in our system” without any further explanation, but it appears that the original tweet was deleted as it does not appear in Twitter Support responses.
“This has now been fixed and you can say ‘Memphis’ again. Sorry about that ”, says the message.
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A Twitter spokesman also provided Gizmodo with the following statement: “The problem mentioned was the result of a bug and has now been resolved.”
However, if true, this does not seem to be the case for everyone. Twitter wouldn’t let me back into my account until I deleted my “Memphis” tweet and yet a lot of features are still limited. Attempting to tweet or retweet anything generates an alert, in the image below, that my account will remain virtually out of service for the next 12 hours. We contacted Twitter for further clarification on this.
Not that I’m complaining, really. A 12-hour break in this hellish place feels like a vacation.
Whatever this bug is, it can only affect us, inexorable workers, like Twitter doesn’t seem to signal my verified coworker’s tweets containing the word. Images or image descriptions with the word “Memphis” also doesn’t seem to hit Twitter’s ban hammer.
There is a certain irony in seeing Twitter’s rapid crackdown on the word “Memphis” after years of struggling to moderate the rampant abuse and intolerance on your platform. But this is Twitter for you: an online haven for literal Nazis but God forbid you to tweet about the birthplace of rock ‘n roll.