Originally Posted by
TravelingPeanut
Twitter treats Tweets that start with an ampersand as being public conversations between two people
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Any of the people following you WILL see your Tweet at AmericanAir IF you start your Tweet with anything other than an ampersand.
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TL;DR: If you're hoping to avoid airing dirty laundry in public on Twitter, your best best to to send a short Tweet starting with an amersand+theaccountname at the account that you want to contact letting them know that you have an issue that you'd like to discuss and asking them to follow you back so that you can have a DM exchange.
I think you've gotten your terminology confused.
An ampersand looks like
& and represents the word
and
An at-sign looks like
@ and represents the word
at
Each ampersand reference in TravelingPeanut's post should actually be an at-sign reference.