Apparently, Twitter really loves mosquitoes.
As convenient and fun as social media can be, there’s also an ugly side to it. Things like cyber bullying and stalking are problems that social media platforms are struggling to find ways to effectively combat. Unfortunately, with so many people on social media it’s impossible for actual people to look over every single picture, tweet and comment that finds its way online. So of course, social media platforms, like Twitter, are relying more and more on computer programs to help in this process. However, automated programs are still far from perfect and as one Japanese Twitter user recently found out, they can make some very interesting mistakes.
On August 20, Twitter user @nemuismywife was relaxing and watching TV when he was bitten several times by a hungry mosquito. In response to the egregious actions of this vampiric insect, @nemuismywife, did what many of us would do, he tracked down his assailant and killed it. Deciding that this little incident was interesting enough to share with the world, he tweeted out a picture of the dead mosquito, along with the following text.
“You bastard! How dare you bite me several times while I’m minding my own business watching TV… DIE! (you’re already dead).”
Shortly after @nemuismywife tweeted out his horrible death threat to the already dead mosquito, he got a seemingly automatically generated and generically worded notification informing him that the content of his tweet had violated the Twitter “rules” and as such his account had been permanently frozen.
Left with little other choice than to open up a new Twitter account (because life without Twitter just isn’t an option, right?), @nemuismywife did just that. After opening his new account (@DaydreamMatcha), on August 25 the mosquito cyber bully tweeted about what Twitter had done to him, sharing both the original threatening tweet and the notification Twitter sent him. This tweet managed to get retweeted over 30,000 times in a little under three days.
Here’s the tweet that @DaydreamMatcha sent out showing the original death threat tweet on the left and the Twitter notification on the right.
蚊を殺害したら前のアカウントが永久凍結されました、これは違反行為でしょうか？
Twitterは徳川綱吉ですか？ pic.twitter.com/bNh4pI8pTb— KBYSHYT (@DaydreamMatcha) August 26, 2017
Of course, given the rather silly nature of this story and the way in which it spread, many Japanese Twitter users couldn’t help but leave comments sharing their views on the whole incident. One user wondered if it was because of the picture of the mosquito corpse. Others criticized Twitter. And one Twitter user, jokingly offered the explanation that this all happened because the Twitter CEO is actually a mosquito (a claim, which has yet to be disproven). In the end though, what seems to be the most likely explanation is that the word “Die” （死ね, shine), triggered a program supposed to detect threatening speech. And unfortunately for @nemuismywife, this then caused the tweet to be flagged without an actual person ever even having laid eyes on it. So until Twitter gets this all sorted out you should probably avoid threatening mosquitoes via tweets. Actually, you should probably just avoid threatening people too.
Source: Hachiman Kiko
Image: Pixabay
