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Why Is This Tweet About Urine Being Posted Over and Over Again?

Photo: @crulge/Twitter

Late last night, Twitter user Tim Faust was struck with inspiration for a tweet. Traveling through San Francisco over the weekend, Faust discovered a bottle of Clorox Urine Remover in one of the bars he’d been patronizing with friends. The bottle, he recounted to Select All over Twitter DM, “passed my extremely low bar to warrant tweeting.”

“I meant to send it to my friend Chris, whose tweets are really bad, but I fucked up and forgot to include his name and also the image, so I quickly re-sent it with the image attached,” he explained.

Unlike most mobile Twitter users, Faust uses a flip phone, a legacy system for interfacing with the service that is rarely in use anymore, but which has dictated some of Twitter’s defining traits. The iconic 140-character limit is a result of SMS character limits. Tweets still cannot start with a singular letter d because that was a command for sending a Twitter DM over SMS.

But over the next few hours, Faust’s joke about your tweets being piss began appearing again and again, published by some ghost in the machine.

“I will never have a child so Twitter is my only legacy and I hastened to correct the record,” he said, unlinking his phone from his Twitter account. A few hours later, he reconnected, and the picture began posting again. “I presume that my phone keeps trying to re-send the tweet with the photo, but I can’t make heads or tails of why it’d do that over and over again—there’s no log of it in my sent texts.”

The Mystery of the Urine Remover has yet to be solved. Faust again unlinked his phone number from Twitter ahead of a flight this afternoon, and he said that he’d try and reset credentials like his password to stop the flood of piss cleaner. A request for comment sent to Twitter earlier this afternoon had not been replied to as of press time. Given that the tweets stopped when Faust unlinked his phone, it’s likely his hardware that’s causing the issue.

Faust and his followers are taking the ever-present urine remover in stride though. “I think of Twitter as a place for me to giggle—or, in this case, piss—into a void,” he noted. “I’m sure it’s far from the most obnoxious thing I’ve ever tweeted.”

As for the future, who knows? “I’m pretty sure my phone is the one goofing up here, and I appreciate that I’ve been humiliated by something that costs like $17 on eBay. I don’t stand a chance against self-driving cars.”

Why Is This Tweet About Urine Being Posted Over and Over?