A couple flying to America was detained at a Los Angeles airport after Homeland Security agents mistook their Twitter tweets as threats against the U.S.
STORY: Sold Out: What If Twitter Censored These Classic Tweets?!
Irishman Leigh Van Bryan, 26, and British citizen Emily Bunting, 24, were interrogated and jailed for 12 hours under armed guards after going through customs in Los Angeles International Airport last week.
According to The Sun, the couple was taken into custody by U.S. Department of Homeland Security agents because of the slang in Bryan’s tweets.
“Free this week, for quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America,” one of the tweets read. Bryan told The Sun that in this context “destroy” just meant party.
“The Homeland Security agents were treating me like some kind of terrorist. I kept saying they had got the wrong meaning from my tweet but they just told me ‘You’ve really f***ed up with that tweet, boy’,” Bryan told The Sun.
After spending the night in custody, Bryan and Bunting were put on a plane back home through Paris.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection released a statement in which the department confirmed that two people had been taken for “secondary interviews” and said that during those interviews, information was uncovered that “revealed both individuals were inadmissible to the United States.”
The moral of this story: don’t tweet anything that you’ll later regret.
