Twitter Suspended This User For Posting About “Monster Energy Ham”

If you use Twitter quite often, then you might already know that one of the weirdest things about the social media site is the way it handles suspensions. Whoever makes the decisions about which accounts get suspended and which don’t sometimes seems to ignore the really bad guys, and goes after the innocent ones. This latest story is proof: Twitter suspended a user for posting about “Monster Energy ham.” Yes, seriously.

In an article on The Daily Dot, the Twitter user who was suspended (W. Jones) wrote about the moment their account was suspended over a seemingly harmless meme. Jones wrote that on Halloween, he saw a “clearly photoshopped image of a Monster Energy-infused ham product,” saved it to his phone, then tweeted it out with a caption that read, “Whom’st was clamoring for energy drink-infused deli meat?”

This seems like a pretty regular occurence on Twitter, no?

It’s the kind of thing that happens all the time. Jones got a bunch of likes, retweets, and mentions, but a few hours later, he noticed his Twitter app wasn’t working. He then saw an email from Twitter saying that his account had been permanently suspended for “violations of Twitter’s Counterfeit Goods Policy.”

When your son Kyle is hungry after motocross practice pic.twitter.com/YowiWDpB91

— adam.the.creator (@AdamPadilla) October 30, 2018

Now, it’s worth pointing out that this wasn’t a meme Jones made — it was made by Adam The Creator. And no, Jones did not give the maker credit for the meme in his original tweet. Still, this is, again, something that happens on Twitter all the time: someone finds a funny picture or meme online and tweets it out with their own funny caption, no credit anywhere. You’ve probably done it yourself!

Jones decided to fight back against the suspension because of his self-professed love for Twitter.

However, the next day, he got another email saying they wouldn’t be reinstating his account. Jones wrote, “But in all seriousness, I was sad. I was angry.” Can you really blame him? Luckily, a few days later, Twitter emailed him to let him know his account was back up.

All jokes aside, this story is frustrating. There are a lot of Twitter users out there using the platform to push harmful messages that can be racist, sexist, violent, threatening, and abusive. It’s annoying to see users get suspended for small things, like reposting memes without credit, when there are users who actually deserve to be punished. Still, that’s not to say the website hasn’t tried. In 2017, they announced new policies to suspend accounts that affiliate themselves with organizations that “use or promote violence against civilians to further their causes.”

But hey, at least this particular story has a happy ending!