Don’t let the cute birdie logo fool you: Twitter is a strange, unpredictable beast. It’s less like an innocuous little finch and more like a testy, bipolar Pteranodon, liable to carry you to the social media stratosphere one day, then try to claw your eyes out the next. So many users—especially celebrities—have torched their own reputations with ill-advised tweets that there’s now even a word for it: twimmolation.
And then there are feeds that just leave the Pteranodon scratching its massive crest with its little foot-claw.
Take the Central Intelligence Agency’s Twitter feed, for instance.
The CIA would seem to be an unlikely fit in the no-secrets world of social media. The place is staffed with literal spies, after all. The agency’s collective job is to collect secrets, not to, y’know, snap off 140-character witticisms. It’s almost akin to the Illuminati sharing snapshots of its latest super-secret barbecue on Pinterest.
But no matter: On June 6, the CIA introduced itself to the world of Twitter with the following post:
We can neither confirm nor deny that this is our first tweet.
The tweet garnered way more attention than the CIA typically enjoys, collecting more than 190,000 likes and 300,000 shares. And for a while, it looked like the CIA would show the celebrity world how to act on social media. For the last month, the agency has peppered its now 700,000-plus followers with historical tidbits, trivia factoids and a badge photo of George H.W. Bush from his days as head of the agency.
But then, in honor of the agency’s month “anniversary” on Twitter (Twitterversaries are marked, apparently, with the same slavish devotion to time as middle school romances), the CIA promised to answer some of the most pressing questions asked of it. The answers:
YES, we are hiring.
And:
No, we don’t know your password, so we can’t send it to you.
And:
No, we don’t know where Tupac is.
The last missive garnered the most attention. Rapper Tupac Shakur was killed in 1996 in Las Vegas. And while there is a persistent Internet rumor that Tupac is actually alive somewhere, many pundits thought the CIA’s tweet was dumb, tactless, troubling or all three.
“Where’s Tupac?” says Philip Bump of The Washington Post. “He’s dead. He got shot. It was in the news. And, thanks to the Atlantic’s David Graham, we can say with some certainty: He was cremated and his ashes laid to rest in North Carolina. Let me Google that for you, America’s premier intelligence agency.”
Alicia Lu of bustle.com declared that the latest batch of tweets “reeks of a grandmother-y social media manager who’s been reading outdated marketing research on young people,” and that the whole feed should be shut down.
“Whoever wrote and signed off on this tweet probably didn’t realize the troubling pedigree behind the very conspiracy theory this tweet was referring to,” wrote Armin Rosen for the Business Insider. “The CIA likely had no idea what it was talking about here—what anxieties it was inadvertently appealing to, or the deeper issues behind a seemingly harmless cultural meme.”
But others thought the tweets were hilarious, including Aly Weisman from—wait for it—the Business Insider. “Whoever is doing the CIA’s social media, we applaud you,” she writes. And the 84,000 people who favorited the tweet joined in the clapping.
When a tweet triggers writers from the same publication to opine completely contradictory thoughts, well, maybe that’s a sign the CIA knows more about bipolar Pteranodons than the rest of us.
Or less. Who really knows?
Figuring out the “right” way to do Twitter is an impossible task. An outstanding feed—that is, one designed to attract attention—must always walk the finest of lines between what’s funny and what’s out of bounds. And, of course, there are no universal standards to determine which is which. I’ve been on Twitter for two years and I still don’t know what I’m doing.
But if anyone can figure it out, my bet’s on the CIA. They have ways, I’m sure, of making the social network give up its secrets. And if you can’t trust a bunch of spies, who can you trust?
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