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This weekend Twitter was buzzing with a new trend, with the hashtag.
Twitter is meant to be the epitome of freedom of speech, but starting messages with certain words will ban your tweet – purely because of quirks in the system which remain from the early days of the network.
Start a two-word message with the word “Get”, and your message will never to be seen again.
Why? Because the word acts almost like the old “shell commands” from the pre-Windows days of DOS – where programmers would type commands like “copy” and “delete” to do those actions nowadays generally covered by right-clicking on files.
On Twitter, if you type “Get” followed by a username, you will instead get the latest Tweet from that user.
You can also try things like “set language german” to affect a language change, or “set bio I am a Twitter user” to update your one-line biography.
“Help” could be a useful command, as could “suggest”, if you want to find more people to follow.
But the “Get” command is likely to stump a few users, as simple messages like “Get Well”, “Get a life”, or “Get me some milk please” will vanish, without warning.
According to BuzzFeed, the reason these commands exist is because they are useful for people who Tweet via SMS: In the same way computer users needed to write commands into DOS, SMS users needed these codes to use the site. – Daily Mail
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