The Death of @JFK

Why Twitter suspended the only thing that made me cool

Earlier this week I received official notice from Twitter that my longstanding @JFK account “Has been suspended and will not be restored.” A cruel blow, delivered via an anonymous Twitter support rep (bot?) in response to my apparently unsuccessful appeal of Case #38191727.

As my wife will readily point out, this was a self-inflicted wound. I suspect commenters will hammer me with “Hey, you didn’t follow their rules so you deserve it.” Maybe that’s the case, but I can’t help feeling like I’m getting the death penalty for a parking violation.

Before detailing the events leading to my suspension, I need to put @JFK in context. I’m a 54-year-old guy, with a developing beer belly, extremely white legs, and a 15-year-old mutt who’s losing her hearing. We live in the suburbs of Boston, we have three twenty-something kids, and I work with a bunch of bright and hip Millennials at an early stage company in the Seaport. They all seem to live in cool places like the South End or above bars named Durty Nelly’s. I take the commuter rail daily from Needham and read the newspaper. Like, the paper version.

I’m decidedly uncool. Except for when people see my Twitter handle. It’s like being a superhero — middle aged guy by day, @JFK by night! People can’t believe that guy has @JFK. How’d I get it? Who did I pay?

Believe it or not, I’ve always been an early adopter. This was demonstrated back in the day via my collection of 8-track tapes. The advent of the internet gave me boundless opportunities to show my enthusiasm for new technologies and services. LinkedIn? Yep, I joined on March 4, 2004, and though you can no longer find your LinkedIn member number I was one of the lucky recipients of Reid Hoffman’s email on March 25, 2011, thanking LinkedIn’s first 1 million members. And Twitter? I joined in March 2007, and snagged @JFK because I’m John Fitzgerald Kelley (my Mom’s maiden name was Fitzgerald). College friends and co-workers have always called me JFK. I can attribute my 1978 victory in high school as Junior Class President to my not-very-creative-but-highly-effective campaign posters: “Vote for JFK.”

@JFK didn’t seem like a huge deal when I opened my account. But, well, now Twitter is Twitter, and @JFK is a badge of honor. See, I am cool!

Until you look at my Twitter feed. I use Twitter to consume news and info, not to Tweet. The modest amount of Tweets I’ve made (161 in 9 1/2 years) has to do with rather mundane things. Some work stuff. Politics. The occasional shaming of companies like Comcast and Delta. Nobody should really be following me. And they don’t.

Except there’s this one thing. I noticed it the day I joined Twitter. And unfortunately, this one thing — and how I responded to it after 9 1/2 years — is what led to my permanent suspension.

Obviously, there are millions of people on Twitter who travel, and apparently a good percentage of them over the past decade have started out in, ended up in, or passed through John Fitzgerald Kennedy airport in NY. And most of these travelers seem to have a point of view on the airport that they absolutely must share with the Twitter universe. So from Day 1, I started receiving notifications. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them. Here’s a small sample to give you a flavor (approximately 0.04% of the @JFK tweets since 2007)…

I’d get notifications about mentions of @JFK:

Notifications when someone favorited a mention of @JFK:

Notifications when someone Retweeted a mention of @JFK:

Even notifications about Tweets in foreign languages that I couldn’t understand:

Of course, on certain days there were Tweets related to the other, much cooler, pre-Twitter JFK. On the anniversary of his assassination I’d receive lots of notifications about tweets like this:

And some heartwarming Tweets on the anniversary of his birthday. They made me happy even though I knew they weren’t talking about me and my high school class presidency…

But ultimately it was the mistaken JFK airport notifications that got to me. So about a month ago, after 9 1/2 years of silently receiving thousands of notifications about mostly unhappy Tweets having nothing to do with me, I decided to have some fun. When a particular Tweet caught my attention (usually from some disgruntled and generally irritable person), I would reply with humor or sarcasm and maybe a hashtag or two. Just trying to have some fun and bring a little levity into the situation…

ILikeEgyptiansDaily, clearly a Francophile, threw some shade at JFK that I couldn’t let stand:

George Weiner was unhappy about the distance and lines he had to endure while waiting for a taxi:

Chance the Fapper (Seriously? Chance the Fapper?) let the world know he was angry:

…and specifically, that he wanted more customs people, dammit:

And OldSaltCityAce just wanted to Make America Great Again:

There were a few others, though admittedly not as funny. A whopping total of 9 tweets over 10 days, all of which were in response to messages to me, @JFK. Fun over, I went back to Retweeting things about Obama and Trump.

Last week I tried to follow someone and received this popup: “Your account is suspended and is not permitted to access this feature.” The Twitter bots — who clearly have been designed without a sense of humor — shut me down. I never even received a notice of suspension. When I emailed Support@Twitter, they opened a case, but on Wednesday they slammed the door:

Bam! No warning, no second chance. I’m trying another appeal, but I’m not optimistic. Am I in violation of Twitter’s impersonation policy? Perhaps, but I wasn’t actually trying to deceive, and I was never the originator. Anyone who takes a look at my tweet history would immediately discern I wasn’t JFK Airport. I Tweeted 9 times in response to people who Tweeted at me, who were directing their ire at the wrong place, and who really should just lighten up a bit. Let’s face it — Twitter is a bit misguided if they think I created @JFK back in 2007 with the intention of spoofing an airport. If I were going to impersonate an account, give me some credit that I’d come up with something better than that. I may be uncool, but I’m not that uncool.

RIP, @JFK.

P.S. If anyone knows Jack Dorsey (@jack, a handle almost as cool as @JFK), please share my plight with him. Maybe he has a sense of humor and will show some appreciation and mercy for one of his early supporters.