Why does anyone have a Twitter account? Moreover, why does any thing—a band, a brand, a government agency—have one? The President might tweet us all into World War III, but at least he’s a person. Less immediately menacing, but equally surreal, are the occasions when the C.I.A. wishes the nation a “Happy #NationalCakeDay!,” or Chick-fil-A picks a fight with Popeyes.
“Social media, naturally, is gonna reach a younger audience,” Phil Murphy, the governor of New Jersey, said the other day, explaining why his state has a Twitter account. “And the younger people are traditionally the ones you need to work harder to win over when it comes to policy issues.” He was in his office in Trenton, wearing gubernatorial casual: gray Allbirds, a navy suit with no tie. His own account, @GovMurphy, is conventional. (“Today, New Jersey’s minimum wage rises to $11/hour.”) The official state-government account, @NJGov, is not. “big state energy,” the State of New Jersey tweeted, apropos of nothing, on December 21st. “u up,” the State of New Jersey tweeted, without punctuation, at 2:45 A.M. on Christmas Eve. “Who let New Jersey have a Twitter,” a guy named Gary wondered, on Twitter, not long ago. “your mom,” the State of New Jersey responded. That one got nearly half a million likes.
“Everyone assumes it’s some sleazy teen-age dude writing the tweets,” Pearl Gabel, New Jersey’s digital director, said.
“Nope!” Megan Coyne, a digital assistant, said. “Just Pearl and me.”
They work in adjoining cubicles, riffing out loud across a gray foam-core barrier. “I’m a millennial,” Gabel, who graduated from college in 2004, said. “So what I bring to the table is more the nostalgia, that rap-battle kind of energy.”
“I’m Gen Z,” Coyne, the former president of the Rutgers Democrats, who graduated last May, said. “I’ve been on Twitter since I was thirteen.”
Gabel and Coyne were sitting with Governor Murphy in his office, and were politely refraining from checking their phones. “I know they’re doing something right,” Murphy said. “Because I’ve got four kids, sixteen to twentytwo. One weekend, all my kids talked about was ‘Dad, the NJGov account is killing it right now.’ ”
“That must have been the weekend of ‘your mom,’ ” Gabel said.
Gabel and Coyne returned to their cubicles, in the communications department. Colleagues stopped by to kibbitz about the State of the State address, which the Governor would deliver in two weeks. “The NJGov account is, like, one per cent of what we do,” Gabel said. “We write press releases, and I’m constantly shooting and editing videos.” Later that day, she would drive to Lakewood to interview a nineteen-year-old mechanic’s assistant for a video about apprentice programs. “Before I leave, though,” she said, “let’s come up with one more fire tweet.”
Coyne scrolled through Twitter, looking for material. “Someone’s tweeting about how Trenton doesn’t deserve to be the capital of New Jersey,” she said. “We could do a response to that. ‘How rude.’ ” They let that idea drop. Gabel surveyed her desk for inspiration: a cucumber water, a half-eaten muffin. “Maybe it could just be ‘muffin,’ ” she said.
“I guess,” Coyne said. “Except, I mean, some people use that as slang for . . .”
“Oh, God, forget it,” Gabel said. She opened an e-mail. “Today is the anniversary of the Battle of Princeton,” she said. “Maybe that’s something?” She opened Wikipedia and read aloud: “1777 . . . George Washington . . . victory for the Colonials.” She looked up. “Yeah, I think we can do something with this.”
They called over Derek Roseman, a speechwriter for the Governor. “You know about history,” Gabel said. “Battle of Princeton. Big deal, right?”
“Oh, definitely,” Roseman said. “The culmination of what Revolutionary War buffs call the Ten Crucial Days, when—”
“We won, right?” Gabel said. She started drafting a tweet: “In 1777, New Jersey won the Battle of Princeton . . .”
“Not all the troops would have been from New Jersey,” Roseman said.
“Fine—‘the battle was won in Jersey’?”
“Fair,” Roseman said.
From Wikipedia, Gabel downloaded an image of an oil painting: George Washington on a rearing white horse. Using Adobe Photoshop, she scrawled a graffito across the picture: “Jersey Wuz Here.” “It doesn’t really make sense, ’cause they’re in Jersey in the painting,” she said.
“Whatever,” Coyne said.
Gabel opened Twitter and started typing. “I’m just free-balling here,” she said.
“ ‘Without N.J. there would be no U.S.,’ ” Roseman suggested.
“We need more of a flex,” Gabel said.
They settled on “january 3, 1777: the battle of princeton was won in new jersey and the revolution was saved / january 3, 2020: new jersey remains undefeated.” Gabel attached the defaced painting. “Bombs away?” she asked.
“Go for it,” Coyne said.
They sat in silence for a moment, watching the response online. Within the first few minutes, the tweet got several hundred likes; by the end of the weekend, it would get more than six thousand. “It’s cute,” Gabel said. “I’d say it’s not a banger. It can’t be ‘your mom’ every day.” ♦
