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?
https://twitter.com/yurivictor/status/771748763568254977
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.
Hard to leave the bed when there's such a beautiful body there. Never want to stop touching it. Yeah I sleep alone. pic.twitter.com/9AfB6QGZgb
— @sweden (@sweden) September 1, 2016
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.
https://twitter.com/yurivictor/status/771754569952997376
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:
https://twitter.com/yurivictor/status/771750974499262464
Regardless of the security checks, plenty of people had already succeeded in tweeting weird stuff where I’d failed. Kudos to these surrogate tweeters:
https://twitter.com/yurivictor/status/771749937067466752
https://twitter.com/yurivictor/status/771750752821841922
https://twitter.com/yurivictor/status/771750982048940032
https://twitter.com/yurivictor/status/771751135464058880
https://twitter.com/yurivictor/status/771751405828902912
https://twitter.com/yurivictor/status/771751695168704512
https://twitter.com/yurivictor/status/771751701082697728
https://twitter.com/yurivictor/status/771752001877204992
https://twitter.com/yurivictor/status/771751986362519552
https://twitter.com/yurivictor/status/771752505676034049
https://twitter.com/yurivictor/status/771752853107007489
https://twitter.com/yurivictor/status/771753104526172164
https://twitter.com/yurivictor/status/771753112516366336
https://twitter.com/yurivictor/status/771753172369113090
https://twitter.com/yurivictor/status/771754194424528896
https://twitter.com/yurivictor/status/771754602739924992
https://twitter.com/yurivictor/status/771762038305656832
https://twitter.com/yurivictor/status/771754910174044160
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:
https://twitter.com/yurivictor/status/771754634264383491
Is have some fun indeed.