In an age when posting the wrong thing on social media routinely gets people fired, dissolves marriages, or just incites an angry mob, you can never be too careful about your internet presence.
Or can you?
I’m on vacation for the next week so I’m outsourcing my tweets to you. Feel free to tweet as @yurivictor https://t.co/qibdCc8icv
— Yuri Victor 🖤 (@yurivictor) September 2, 2016
Yes, that’s Yuri Victor—a designer and developer with Vox Media—telling the internet to tweet for him while he’s off doing something presumably more fun than tweeting. It should prove a fairly interesting experiment. We already know from Sweden’s national Twitter account, which is controlled by a different Swede every week, that things can quickly get… intimate.
https://twitter.com/sweden/status/771249379994800128
So what happened when Victor flipped the switch and gave the whole world the chance to tweet as him? You may not be terribly surprised.
80 percent harambe tweets. You can’t get anything past my filters.
— Yuri Victor 🖤 (@yurivictor) September 2, 2016
Ah—so you can’t just tweet anything. And you can’t attach images or video, which spoiled my plan to tweet a semi-nude selfie of Geraldo Rivera. So instead I tried to disguise a link to the image, writing “I don’t usually think of shock polls, but wow.” This didn’t show up on Victor’s timeline either. I tried one last desperate gambit, but alas—it, too, failed to take.
After this, I got a note from Victor’s site that read, “whoa that’s a lot of amazing tweeting for one day. gonna take a break for a while,” which could either mean that I had run afoul of his filters once too often or just that the application itself has been overloaded. Or, perhaps most likely:
How long until @yurivictor hits the Twitter API rate limits?
— Yuri Victor 🖤 (@yurivictor) September 2, 2016
Regardless of the security checks, plenty of people had already succeeded in tweeting weird stuff where I’d failed. Kudos to these surrogate tweeters:
I, for one, don’t think you should put fruit on pizza.
— Yuri Victor 🖤 (@yurivictor) September 2, 2016
Can I really make this guy say whatever I want?
— Yuri Victor 🖤 (@yurivictor) September 2, 2016
https://twitter.com/yurivictor/status/771750982048940032
I am a potato
— Yuri Victor 🖤 (@yurivictor) September 2, 2016
https://twitter.com/yurivictor/status/771751405828902912
https://twitter.com/yurivictor/status/771751695168704512
https://twitter.com/yurivictor/status/771751701082697728
https://twitter.com/yurivictor/status/771752001877204992
Please vaccinate your children. There is no link to autism.
— Yuri Victor 🖤 (@yurivictor) September 2, 2016
https://twitter.com/yurivictor/status/771752505676034049
Peas in guacamole is actually really awesome.
— Yuri Victor 🖤 (@yurivictor) September 2, 2016
https://twitter.com/yurivictor/status/771753104526172164
You Have Distracted From My Creative Process
— Yuri Victor 🖤 (@yurivictor) September 2, 2016
https://twitter.com/yurivictor/status/771753172369113090
https://twitter.com/yurivictor/status/771754194424528896
Collaborative tweets are the ~future~ of journalism
— Yuri Victor 🖤 (@yurivictor) September 2, 2016
Save the drama for yo llama
— Yuri Victor 🖤 (@yurivictor) September 2, 2016
Happy Birthday to the three meatball sandwiches I ate on this day last year.
— Yuri Victor 🖤 (@yurivictor) September 2, 2016
So it turns out the answer to the question “what happens if you let all your friends tweet for you, so long as you place commonsense limits on the content they can post?” is: You start to sound kind of like a bot.
But hey, it sure beats becoming some kind of grotesque Nazi sex addict, which is what usually happens to internet properties given over to group influence. Victor’s experiment has been pretty innocent by comparison:
is have some fun
— Yuri Victor 🖤 (@yurivictor) September 2, 2016
Is have some fun indeed.
