The Olympics Stole My Twitter and I’m Salty About It

Not to be a salty little Sir/Madam, which I am, but I would be remiss not to mention that making parody videos of Olympic events, however dumb they are, is legal under parody law. These emails also requested a written apology from both Twitter and the International Olympics Committee via two cop-yright hounds named Carlos and Marianne:

Ten minutes, Carlos and Marianne? Get a life, Carlos and Marianne!

For the record, companies hounding individual users isn’t a problem that exists in a void—while Facebook is the main culprit, major social media outlets have a history of acting in favor of their advertisers before their significantly less breaded users. The International Olympics Committee has a particularly brutal record of going after users who make any transformative use of their videos. Meanwhile, Twitter verifies Neo-Nazis.

But I am but one pervert on the world wide web, and have been using the same Twitter handle to artfully subtweet anyone who has wronged me since my sophomore year of high school. I’d like to keep it. Plus, like any dubiously employed comedian who cannot currently afford anxiety medication whose packaging doesn’t prominently feature clip art, I would rather chew my own hand off than confront someone.

So I apologized.

In the interest of complete transparency, I’ll show you what I wrote to Carlos and Marianne, with some annotated afterthoughts.

Hello, IOC and concerned parties [AUTHOR’S NOTE: sic “Hi bitch!”]:

My name is Jamie Loftus, and I was asked to follow up with the IOC in addition to Twitter after a complaint was filed by your company about my account. [AUTHOR’S NOTE: Do you think Carlos and Marianne have ever met? If so, do they hook up while music they have written to the artist directly and gotten express permission to use plays in the back-ground?] Here are the tweets I received complaints about:

•Adam Rippon skating to the audiobook Financial Freedom by Suze Orman [AUTHOR’S NOTE: Good one Jamie.]
•Mirai Nagasu skating to the audiobook of Success for Dummies
•Evgenia Medvedeva skating to Alan Arkin’s acceptance speech for Little Miss Sun-shine [AUTHOR’S NOTE: haha Jamie, another funny one and good job.]
•The Shibutani siblings skating to the Frost / Nixon tapes
•Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir skating to the Fatty Arbuckle episode of Mysteries and Scandals [AUTHOR’S NOTE: This one wasn’t my best and I’m not sad to see it go.]

I don’t believe they are visible anymore, but these were multiple parody videos I had made of this year’s figure skating events. [AUTHOR’S NOTE: Are Carlos and Marianne even invited to the Olympics? Are they, like many figure skaters, embarrassing themselves and their country to a completely licensed copy of Michael Bublé’s “Feelin’ Good” in Pyeongchang?] While I do believe that these videos are protected under parody law [AUTHOR’S NOTE: I bet my friend it would take less than three male skaters to get to a Michael Bublé medley and I won.] and were made to celebrate and promote your games in a funny way, I have every intention of ensuring they are removed once the complaints are resolved and retracted [AUTHOR’S NOTE: I came very close to making a video of Nathan Chen eating shit in his short program scored to the Jonestown tapes. Hindsight.]

Because my account was suspended, I am currently unable to delete anything, though Twitter has removed the videos anyways [AUTHOR’S NOTE: Los Angeles will NOT host the Olympics in 2028 if my Twitter account is not restored. They will not stand for me, their hot-test citizen (I LITERALLY DARE YOU TO FACTCHECK THIS), being denigrated in this fash-ion.] I promise to never tweet using any IOC video content again [AUTHOR’S NOTE: This, to me, is scathing but I realize that Carlos and Marianne don’t care.] Apol-ogies for any oversight on my part. [AUTHOR’S NOTE: “Jamie, stop apologiz-ing!” my former therapist is saying somewhere, the stick and poke tattoo he has of my face tin-gling.]

I can assure you I will not be bothering you in the future with any content of any kind [AUTHOR’S NOTE: COMPLETELY SAVAGE, SCATHING AND A TAKEDOWN OF ALL THAT IS HOLY!], and would appreciate if the complaint were retracted [AUTHOR’S NOTE: sic “bitch”]— the site has already removed the videos you asked them to, and it is very difficult for me to do my job [AUTHOR’S NOTE: not sure what job I am referring to or if any of what I have done in the past eighteen months could qualify as a job] without my account.

Thanks,

Jamie Loftus [AUTHOR’S NOTE: My mom wanted to name me “Randi” but my dad said “Randi Loftus” sounded like “someone who’d be friends with Paula Poundstone,” which at that time must have been bad.]

Maybe Carlos and Marianne will see reason, or maybe I will become a woman staring at a screen, holding a two-liter bottle of Diet Coke muttering the names of her sexual partners in chronological order for the next ten years. In the meantime, you can catch me at the rink, prac-ticing my 2022 gold routine to Maggie Gyllenhaal’s audiobook of Anna Karenina.

SERIOUS POSTSCRIPT TO THE INTERNATIONAL OLYMPICS COMMITTEE AND TWITTER DOT COM: Hey, gang, this is Jamie. What’s up! You’ve just read a comedy piece. The things I said in this comedy piece? They’re not serious. What isn’t a joke is: jerking users around by not telling them when their suspensions will be lifted, misrepresenting an account’s suspension by telling individual users I’ve blocked them personally rather than being suspended, and requesting a series of personalized apologies for what I believed to be fair use under parody law. No one wants to look like as big a square as Zuckerberg. Please be like the Winklevoss twins and be hot and give me my account back. Thanks!

Jamie Loftus is a comedian and writer. You can find her some of the time, most days at @hamburgerphone (assuming Twitter and the IOC unlock her account) or jamieloftusisinnocent.com.