Welcome to the Golden Age of Weird Promoted Tweets

Internet ads are getting creepier each year, more precise in their targeting and omnipresent on the screen. Last month on Instagram, I saw an ad for Aperol right after I’d run out of Aperol. These promos are often uncomfortably accurate, which is why I often try to scroll past promoted content without looking at it at all. Recently, though, on Twitter, many of the “promoted tweets” in my feed have been well worth reading. Instead of adding to the glut of online ads, they’re an odd antidote.

Twitter is a twisted dopamine-manipulation machine that rewards antisocial behavior and we’d all benefit from logging out and quarantining Jack Dorsey on an organic yoga farm in Tulum or whatever. On the other hand, Twitter, in spite of itself, continues to incubate some of the most ingenious, strange, gloriously petty behavior on the internet, and the results are good internet. Case in point: Individual Twitter users have embraced a program the company created for advertisers—they’ve seized the means of self-promotion, if you will. We’re living through the golden age of Weird Promoted Tweets.

What are Weird Promoted Tweets? It’s easier to show than tell. Here is a sampling, courtesy of Twitter users who shared them with The Ringer:

Twitter, which declined to comment for this story, describes promoted tweets as “ordinary Tweets purchased by advertisers who want to reach a wider group of users or to spark engagement from their existing followers.” They’re supposed to be advertisements embedded in your Twitter feed, with a label at the bottom signaling that someone paid money for them to appear. (According to digital marketing company ThriveHive, the average cost for a promoted tweet was $1.35 per engagement in 2017.) But Weird Promoted Tweets are not purchased by advertisers, at least not in the traditional sense, and while they do intend to engage with a wide group of users, they don’t attempt to sell anything. Instead, they’re personal missives the tweeter simply felt gassed up enough about to pay legal tender to disseminate online.

People promote just about anything you could think of, including subtweets, selfies, photos of dogs, celebrity quotes, inexplicable pirate content, attempts to get more Pokémon Go friends, confusing stories about inappropriate workplace conduct, sugar daddy requests, Edward Snowden–themed art, incoherent rants aimed at the pop star Dua Lipa about the nature of censorship, misguided tech support queries, and anti-Communist rants. The Twitter account Promoted Tweets has collected some of the more flagrantly bizarre offerings for the past month, and its feed demonstrates how frequently promoted tweets branch far, far away from marketing and into surrealist net art. Viewing them one after another feels nothing like seeing advertisements but exactly like sneaking a glimpse at what it looks like when people yearn for someone to listen.

Some Weird Promoted Tweets are completely sincere; I talked to one Twitter user who had promoted a tweet asking for the truth about fake news (it has since been deleted) and he emphasized that he really wanted to know what other people thought. “I was looking for answers,” he said. He spent $200 for the privilege. Other Weird Promoted Tweeters are just having some fun. Writer Mark Shrayber, for instance, spent $100 to promote an idea for a reality television show starring himself and Kylie Jenner. “I did not get a show, only many angry people asking why I was tweeted into their timeline,” he said.

Some people are more likely to see Weird Promoted Tweets than others. Twitter serves every user promoted content, but it does allow for controls: If you don’t like what you get served, you can flag it. At one point this year, I flagged a bunch of corporate ads in my feed, which is likely why the glut of promoted tweets I see now come from individuals or small organizations instead of, say, Coca-Cola or Nike. I’m not alone in that behavior. “I started blocking basically every company that puts a promoted tweet in my timeline,” Twitter user Zach Zarnow told The Ringer. Now, Zarnow dwells in the world of Weird Promoted Tweets.

One promoted tweet that caught my eye recently came from a user without a photo, who seemed to have created the account expressly for the purpose of venting about how a United Airlines employee had called him a “dumbass.” I felt great sympathy for this non-dumbass, as airline customer service is frequently demonic and, unfortunately, badgering their accounts on social media is one of the only semi-effective avenues to resolve problems. It’s a use case that serves as a reminder that the platforms can actually be helpful at boosting visibility.

U.K.-based businessman Hasan Syed was a pioneer in the art of leveraging promoted tweets to complain about airlines. In 2013, he became so frustrated at British Airways, which had lost his father’s luggage, that he decided to pay to promote his complaint after the company failed to help him. “I was working against time since my dad was hopping around Europe. So when they didn’t respond, I tried the promotion route to try to get their attention,” he told The Ringer via Twitter. Syed spent around $1,000 to prove his point; the company did reach out to him later that day. “People love to take shots at big institutions, especially airlines, so there was a lot of sympathy from anyone who’s had to deal with an airline,” Syed said. A Canadian Twitter user tried a similar tactic this year, spending around $50 to promote a tweet about their unhappiness with the service from WestJet, a regional airline carrier. “I wasn’t looking to get anything but a little personal satisfaction. And that worked,” they told The Ringer. “Companies need to realize that they spend money pumping their message out but customers have their own outlet now to reach the masses.”

This emerging customer service complaint tactic isn’t limited to airlines, although results aren’t guaranteed or even likely. Brooklyn-based educator and singer-songwriter Kenneth Helman promoted a tweet to complain about Apple after the company failed to adequately address a complaint. “I bought about $300-400 for my Bad Apple campaign,” Helman said. “Proved to be of no value.” The lack of response from big companies like Apple underlines how asymetrical the power dynamic between consumer and corporation can be. Perhaps if Helman had splashed out for a much larger campaign, he might have caught the tech giant’s attention—but, then, who has so much money lying around that they’re willing to spend big just to be heard? This strain of promoted tweet isn’t weird so much as it is quixotic, an attempt to subvert the purpose of the tool, changing it from part of a corporation’s promotional arsenal into an instrument to stand up to corporations.

The internet is built for advertisers, not regular people, and there’s something comforting about the way promoted tweets have evolved into a mishmash of weirdness and legitimate complaints against advertisers. It’s fitting that Twitter, often so incompetent at figuring out how to make its service better for the people who use it, inadvertently created a way to showcase what people are desperate to say in an attempt to appease and profit off of corporate users. These messy, off-label uses of a marketing tool make the digital world feel more human.