an unlikely primer

“do u ever just stop and say damn most of me is water”

A few days ago I was having a particularly shitty day, one of those you just have to power through and get done. Like I had for most days after I heard about this account, I turned to @bill_nye_tho because it made me laugh

I have to admit, it made a shitty day extra shitty, and I was a little mad.

For Dick-knows-what reason, Twitter saw fit to suspend one of my favorite internet funny people. Maybe they looked like a spammer to some heuristic somewhere, but that’s a bigger problem, it doesn’t actually matter, the outrage was palpable in my timeline at least. Throughout a fairly shitty day overall for the internet, Twitter inexplicably took away one of the things that I leaned on for comfort and for the past couple of days a couple of things have been eating away at me.

Why?

Were I my roommate I would conjure some conspiracy about @bill_nye_tho taking attention away from @TheScienceGuy and having the real Bill Nye orchestrate a social media takeover. But honestly, I’m not my roommate and I would like to believe that the actual Bill Nye found the account rather hilarious, that’s the Bill Nye I felt I grew up to love. Was there any content on @bill_nye_tho that was inappropriate? Yeah, but you’re on the internet, A LOT of content is inappropriate, especially on Twitter.

Did it get reported by people? I’m sure there are people out there who firmly believe the world is a cold, dark place and no one should have fun at another person’s expense and would immediately hit the “Report” button for @bill_nye_tho, but any human reviewer can clearly take one look at the account and see that it’s just a human being goofy for the benefit of other humans. Even if it was suspended for claiming to be the actual Bill Nye (which it wasn’t), the profile clearly read “ayyye i’m fake Bill Nye lmao real Bill Nye here – @TheScienceGuy”

I honestly can’t come up with a reasonable explanation for the why, I’m hoping that a combination of bogus spam heuristics yielding a false positive and the bureaucracy behind getting anything done at Twitter are why it’s still suspended.

What happens to the comedic brilliance of @bill_nye_tho?

As far as more tweets: Lucas Gardner, author and mastermind said he wouldn’t continue the account, even if it did get unsuspended. Fine I guess, once a joke runs its course, sometimes its good to just let it die. The account has had several imitators since then but they all feel somewhat hollow.

That brings up a larger point though, where do we relive moments in social media like @bill_nye_tho? Luckily Favstar doesn’t delete tweets from suspended accounts, so a good chunk of the account lives on through peoples’ faves and retweets. As far as I can tell though, anyone who retweeted the account had its tweet removed from their timeline, which really sucks. Hopefully Favstar leaves those pages intact.

Sure, losing one person’s funny tweets might not be a big deal, but what happens when it’s about history itself being discussed? It seems we’re doomed to slowly forget, like humans and not awful and precise memory-recalling computers. Luckily, some people try to remember and rejoice in remembering. I don’t feel like getting to deep into it, only that I’m somewhat certain things like this will be my generation’s memory and that I think it’s important to preserve in some way. So I’ll end it with this:

RIP @bill_nye_tho, you made me laugh at least several times per tweet