“Most government agencies were like, ‘O.K., we’re doing social media, get a picture of the commissioner hard at work at their desk and post that,’” said Rob Casimir, the senior education and engagement specialist at the New York City Conflicts of Interest Board.
He was seated at a mahogany table, surrounded by bookcases stacked with volumes of legal records, recalling when the agency realized it had to change.
“That picks up no traction, so it’s the same as doing nothing,” Mr. Casimir, 34, said. “You’re competing with literally @dril right above you and Jordan Uhl breaking a story right below you.” (@dril is one of the founding fathers of “weird Twitter,” and Jordan Uhl is a popular progressive activist.)
And, Mr. Casimir said, “New Yorkers infamously have a sense of humor about things, so why wouldn’t we do this?”
He said it was either 2015 or 2016 when the tone of @NYCCOIB began to shift from staid legalese to dry and self-mocking humor. So now, in addition to retweeting news stories about ethics reform, the account also asks followers to weigh in on the ethics of going to SantaCon and posts memes.
Many of the account’s tweets poke fun at how other public offices wield influence; earlier this month, for example, Mr. Casimir shared an ethics-focused spin on a New York state poster released by Gov. Andrew Cuomo. The edited version was designed by Isaiah Tanenbaum, another education and engagement specialist with the Conflicts of Interest Board, who Photoshops all the strange graphics that appear on the @NYCCOIB feed.
It is not lost on the Conflicts of Interest Board that most people on Twitter have no idea that the agency exists, or what purpose it serves. With a few memes and a playful voice, Mr. Casimir said, @NYCCOIB can at least get people in the door, so they may develop a greater appreciation for public ethics.
“What’s the purpose of social media? To communicate with people with where they’re at, and make them slightly more interested in what we have to talk about,” said Alex Kipp, the board’s director of education and engagement.
In that sense, @NYCCOIB is part of a growing movement of public agencies that are getting more experimental on social media in order to expand their limited bureaucratic footprint.
Earlier this month, for example, the San Antonio Water System, which regulates the water utilities for the Texas city, tweeted a joke about Baby Yoda reaching to flush the toilet. In October, the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer fired off a tweet about clogging a friend’s toilet using an image of the widely memed Cleveland Browns quarterback Baker Mayfield.
The Department of Transportation in Northern Virginia used a GIF of a confused German shepherd to ask drivers to refrain from speeding.
Brendan Gahan, the chief social officer for the marketing company Mekanism, which has worked with brands including Alaska Airlines, OKCupid and Under Armour, said the C.I.A. may have started the Twitter trend. The agency’s first post on the platform, in 2014, read: “We can neither confirm nor deny that this is our first tweet.” The federal government, it appeared, was allowed to be funny online.
“I think other government organizations look at that as the benchmark, and must be asking themselves, ‘If the most secretive, serious government organization can have some fun on Twitter, why can’t we?’” Mr. Gahan said.
The private sector has also moved the needle. In recent years, multinational brands have dropped some of the careful pretenses of corporate social media to instead spur vitriolic chicken sandwich feuds.
Nathan Allebach, a social media manager who counts among his successes the Steak-umm Twitter account, believes the voguish disregard for the established rules of institutional social media traces back to the beginning of the Trump administration. For the first time in American history, he said, we have a president who constantly tweets in his own unmistakable voice.
“When the most powerful person in the world utilizes a major communication outlet with such little regard and arguably more reward than consequence, why wouldn’t everyone else follow suit?” Mr. Allebach said.
@NJGov, the official feed of the state of New Jersey, has taken that motto and run with it. Founded in 2018, the account has gained more than 178,000 followers with a distinct blend of Gen Z patois and Garden State attitude.
The account’s pinned tweet, in response to someone asking who allowed New Jersey to be on Twitter, reads simply, “your mom.” Since last December, it has accumulated 86,000 retweets. A tweet on Jan. 6, which claimed that the internet abbreviation “SMH” (“shaking my head”) stood for “Springsteen My Hero,” was liked by Mr. Springsteen’s account.
The @NJGov feed is run by Megan Coyne, 22, and her boss, Pearl Gabel, who would not give her age but described herself as an “elder millennial.” They describe an editorial process that effectively amounts to texting memes back and forth, posting the ones they like best with minimal oversight.
“It wasn’t a thought-out strategy, we just kind of started to do it,” Ms. Coyne said. “As we saw that weirder, funnier and more ridiculous things were working, we kept going forward with it.”
Ms. Coyne and Ms. Gabel believe their tweets serve a higher purpose: keeping constituents engaged with state affairs. The @NJGov’s timeline isn’t all memes; there are also weather alerts, legislative updates and emergency broadcasts.
“It’s like a mullet: business up front and party in the back,” said Ms. Gabel, explaining the dueling personae of @NJGov. “We can’t just do all business, and we can’t just do all party.”
This thought is echoed by Gavino Ramos, 48, who works on the aforementioned pithy San Antonio Water System Twitter account with Daniel Vargas, 49. The awkwardness of their task — to make water policy a natural organ of the social media culture — isn’t lost on either of them.
“We’re trying to make water topical. Water is something that comes out of the sky. You don’t even think about it,” Mr. Ramos said. “I think what we’re trying to do is difficult, because we want people to take a second and think about it.”
Mr. Casimir said that the Conflicts of Interest Board doesn’t have a huge budget, a large staff or much news to report, which makes growing a following challenging.
“The only way to cut through is to make a good-faith effort to humanize yourself,” Mr. Casimir said.
If that doesn’t work, he said, “we can just stop doing it. That’s what Mr. Peanut did.”
