Beloved ‘the Simpsons’ Twitter Page Shuts Down Amid Elon Musk Takeover

November 13, 2022 Stan

Twitter account @SimpsonsQOTD gained over 634,000 followers sharing jokes from “The Simpsons.”
The creator behind the account, Charlie Southern, posted over 13,000 times over nine years.
He told Insider why he’s now decided to shut down the hugely popular account.

In 2013, Charlie Southern from Liverpool, UK, was in his twenties and working a job on reception where he was mostly left unsupervised.

As a TV fan, he found himself with a head full of quotes from his favorite shows, and was spending a lot of time on Twitter. When he couldn’t find a place on the platform to catch up on the best moments from “The Simpsons,” he decided to create one himself.

Within a year @SimpsonsQOTD had blown up, reaching over 200,000 followers who tuned in for a daily dose of “The Simpsons” humor. Southern filled the feed with jokes and clips, often linking them to topical and newsworthy moments, and the numbers continued to grow, gaining over 634,000 followers at its peak.

—SimpsonsQOTD (@SimpsonsQOTD) November 1, 2022

But after almost a decade of daily tweets, posting over 13,000 times in total, Southern, now 33, has announced the end of the popular project. He told Insider he never expected the account to become so popular, but as Twitter changes and his life evolves, he needed to take a step back.

The account was immediately popular with fans of the show

Shortly after creating the account, Southern said he began following other people he thought would be interested in his content, and said the way the account snowballed from there was “very strange” as he recalls reaching 10,000 followers within a couple of months.

On average Southern said he posted three times a day, only pausing the uploads when he went on vacation. To create his content, he said he’d typically watch between 10 and 12 episodes of “The Simpsons” in a single sitting every three months to gather his library of clips, which meant he had a bank of 200 screengrabs ready to use at any time.

—SimpsonsQOTD (@SimpsonsQOTD) September 20, 2022

To keep the page relevant Southern chose quotes and images that worked well alongside topical figures and events, poking jibes at Donald Trump and the 2020 Election to help bring some levity to the app.

“Twitter can be so negative can’t it, and I want people to get on there and see something that’s nostalgic or funny or something that just makes them feel a little bit better,” he said.

Using copyrighted content, such as clips from a TV show, can sometimes cause complications for online creators, but Southern said he was never concerned about any legal repercussions as he felt it was clear from day one that it was a fan account, and he was making no money from it.

And he was right — he was even contacted by Mike Scully, a writer and former showrunner of “The Simpsons” who private-messaged him in June 2020 to say he loved the account, which reminded him of old jokes he’d forgotten about.

“It makes me laugh all over again, or it brings back a great memory of being in the room when it was pitched or the first time I read it in somebody’s script,” Scully wrote in a message seen by Insider.

Recent changes to Twitter were a catalyst for Southern’s decision to end the account

Having spent nine years on the account, Southern recently made the decision to stop posting, as he had personal commitments he wanted to focus on. But it was Elon Musk taking the helm of the platform that ended up being the catalyst for his exit.

“Twitter is obviously changing and it’s quite obvious over the last couple of weeks that the changes are coming through,” he said.

Southern said he had concerns about the recent takeover on Twitter and how it may affect the platform, such as the potential that fan or parody accounts could be shut down, which Southern says accelerated his decision to end the account.

The very last tweet Southern shared referenced a credit scene from “The Simpsons,” showing a cinema audience member with the caption, “Shhh” and Southern confirmed it was the last post on November 8 with a quote tweet from his personal account which read, “@SimpsonsQOTD is finished. Been a fun 9 years!”

—Charlie (@oneheadlight89) November 8, 2022

Fans of the account reacted to the news it was ending by posting clips of their own from the show. One Twitter user said, “This account will be sadly missed,” while another described it as the “end of an era.”

Despite never having predicted the growth of the account, Southern said the experience has left him with nothing but positive memories — and he has too many favorite quotes to narrow it down to just one but felt by using the final credit scene from the show he had ended the account on a high note.

Southern now sees the page as an archive of “The Simpsons” for all fans to appreciate, and has no plans to remove the existing tweets, allowing anyone to scroll through should they wish to.

“It really was genuinely brilliant to speak to so many people from all over the world and we all have this one thing in common which was a love of classic ‘Simpsons,'” Southern said. ” It’s been an absolute pleasure.”

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