Memphis, Tennessee, is a city with a storied 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 site.
Over the weekend, users of the social network found that simply tweeting the word “Memphis” was enough to get them an automatic 12-hour suspension and a requirement to delete the tweet.
According to the moderation posts, that broke Twitter’s rules on the distribution of personal information – and to be fair to the site, Memphis is the home address of more than 600,000 people, although most mail carriers need more specificity to deliver a letter.
A Twitter spokesperson confirmed the blocks were a mistake. “Earlier today, there was a system issue affecting accounts tweeting the word ‘Memphis’,” the company said in a statement.
“The issue mistakenly requested account owners to remove those Tweets and temporarily limited their account functions. The affected accounts have now been restored and this issue has been resolved.”
In the meantime, news of the ban spread through whispers and allusions on the social network. References to “the M word” and “M ******” were common, as users reacted with horror at seeing unsuspecting observers ask what was wrong with saying “Memphis” before responding to their turn got a ban.
mcc
(@ mcclure111)It’s really weird how you spend just an hour not saying the word ‘Memphis’ so quickly that you interpret the word as some kind of obscene quality or shape in your head. I can understand now when I say the word “Memphis!” name calling, for example when receiving bad news
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 had been misrepresented. “What is possible is that a Twitter employee tried to block a street address, but the post’s syntax acted like an escape sequence, or the original was multiple lines and they just pasted the city,” Swift wrote about security
However, the company has a history of accidentally going a little further than intended. Notoriously enough was Jack Dorsey himself, Twitter’s co-founder and CEO temporarily banned from the site in 2016, because of “an internal error”.
In 2018 Dorsey apologized for ‘unfair’ filtering of 600,000 accounts from search results, applying a so-called “shadow ban” to users, including members of Congress, based on the behavior of accounts that followed them. “We decided that wasn’t fair, and we corrected that,” Dorsey said at the time.