Memphis, Tennessee, is a city with a historic past. A heart of rock’n’roll, blues, gospel and country music, it is the home of 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 website.
Over the weekend, users of the social network found that simply tweeting the word “Memphis” was enough to put them on automatic 12-hour suspension and the need to delete the tweet.
According to the moderation messages, this violated Twitter’s rules on the disclosure of personal information – and to be fair to the site, Memphis is the home address of more than 600,000 people, although most courier operators require more specificity for the delivery of a letter.
A Twitter spokesman confirmed that the blocks were a mistake. “Earlier today, there was a system problem affecting accounts that tweeted the word ‘Memphis’,” the company said in a statement.
“The issue mistakenly requested account owners to delete these Tweets and temporarily limited their account resources. The affected accounts have been reinstated and this issue has been resolved. “
Meanwhile, news of the ban spread through the social network through whispers and allusions. References to “word with M” and “M ******” were common, as users reacted with horror when they saw unsuspecting observers ask what was wrong with saying “Memphis” before immediately receiving the ban.
It’s really weird how just spending an hour without permission to say the word “Memphis” so quickly makes you interpret the word as having some kind of obscene quality or shape in your mind. I can now understand using the word “Memphis!” as a curse, for example, when receiving bad news
– mcc (@ mcclure111) March 14, 2021
Twitter did not explain why Memphis was blocked, but some users have speculated that an attempt to prevent a user from sharing personal information was entered incorrectly. “What is possible is that a Twitter employee tried to block an address, but the postal syntax acted as an escape sequence or the original was multiline and they just pasted the city,” wrote Swift on security.
However, the company has a history of taking moderation a little further than it had accidentally planned. Notoriously, Jack Dorsey, co-founder and chief executive of Twitter himself, was banned from the site temporarily in 2016, due to “an internal error”.
In 2018, Dorsey apologized for “unfairly” filtering 600,000 accounts from the results of the research, 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 was not fair and corrected it,” said Dorsey at the time.