Twitter bans people posting the word Memphis
Twitter users discovered that simply tweeting with the word Memphis - a city in Tennessee - was enough to automatically block them for 12 hours, and a condition for deleting the tweet.
According to the supervisory messages, doing so violated Twitter's rules on posting personal information, knowing that the city of Memphis is home to more than 600,000 people.
A Twitter spokesperson confirmed that the ban was a mistake, and the company said in a statement: There was a system problem affecting earlier accounts that tweet the word Memphis.
She added: The problem mistakenly requested that the account holders delete those tweets while temporarily limiting the account's features, and the affected accounts have now been restored to their previous status and this problem has been resolved.
During that period, news of the ban spread through social media through hints, and references to the word M were common, as users reacted to the question about what was wrong with Memphis before receiving the ban immediately.
Twitter did not explain why Memphis was banned, but some users speculated that it was an attempt to prevent the sharing of personal information of a specific user that had been incorrectly entered.
The company has a history of imposing oversight by mistake a little further than intended, and (Jack Dorsey) himself, co-founder and CEO of Twitter, is known to have been temporarily banned from the site in 2016, due to an internal bug.
And in 2018, Dorsey apologized for unfairly filtering 600,000 accounts from search results, and applying something called ShadowBan - or blocking a user without their knowledge by making their posts and comments invisible to other users - to users, including members of Congress, based on The behavior of the accounts that were following them.
Dorsey said at the time: We decided it wasn't fair, and it was corrected.