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We broke Twitter with #brands

We broke Twitter with #brands

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Taking responsibility for the worst Magic Rec ever

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Earlier today The Verge wrote about Tumblr's decision to let one of its partners start scanning all image uploads for brands, a move so momentous I was prompted to upload an easy one to get them started:

caseynewton

This somehow triggered Twitter's Magic Recs algorithm, which is meant to alert Twitter users of important conversations taking place in the global town square. Immediately, anyone smart enough to follow me and executive editor Dieter Bohn were alerted that we were, well ...

To our knowledge, this is the worst Magic Rec that has ever been rec'd. It offers an important lesson that when you tweet about #brands, you are playing with dark magic, and should proceed with extreme caution. (My colleague Nathan Ingraham ignored this advice and created this spoken-word nightmare remix of me saying "brands" in various intonations; it is a weaponized form of audio that may disrupt your central nervous system.)

Anyway, our own Chris Ziegler may have said it best: