an update on my Twitter account hacking

by Alison Green on December 8, 2022

My Twitter account was hacked on Tuesday and I still don’t have access to it. So for now, I’m tweeting from @RealAskAManager. If you’d like to see my tweets, please follow the new account until the old one is restored!

Update: Twitter came through and my original account is restored and back in my hands!

{ 67 comments }

{ 67 comments… read them below }

  1. AaronK*

    Given the current state of Twitter, I wouldn’t hold your breath on getting your old account back.

    1. Keymaster of Gozer*

      Sadly, this is true. One of our corporate ones (a minor one) was hacked too and there’s been little to no response from Twitter.

    2. bratschegirl*

      Is there anyone left there in the “getting hacked accounts back to their rightful owners” department?

      1. Blazer+990*

        A friend of mine lost her decade old account on Facebook last month due to a hacker who changed her name to Chris Cuomo (of all people!) She can’t prove she’s the owner now apparently.. so it’s just gone. All those memories. :(

    3. Blazer+990*

      Surprisingly, I reported an account for posting threats of violence last week.. and it was taken down! I

    1. Mark the Herald*

      I joined Mastodon. I consider myself reasonably savvy, but I gave up on it after about 20 minutes or so. It made me work too hard.

      1. Zombeyonce*

        Same here. I’m trying Tribel and have signed up for the Post waitlist. We’ll see if either turn out to be decent alternatives.

      2. Ariaflame*

        Well, it has a completely different feel to twitter, you don’t get served things on a plate, but if you use hashtags and follow the ones that interest you, I am not finding a lack of material, but with on the whole not nearly as many people I want to block. Some, but they don’t usually last long.

      3. Grace Poole*

        People trying to explain how Mastodon works remind me of Ben explaining the Cones of Dunshire game to Leslie on Parks and Rec.

    2. NerdyKris*

      I’m not too keen on that whole “whatever rando runs the instance can ban your account and block it from being moved to a new one” thing.

        1. Bryce*

          But there’s organization, court of public opinion, in theory accountability. May not get your account back but Mastodon is so decentralized that Some Rando stays Some Rando.

    3. Love+to+WFH*

      To the folks saying that Mastodon is confusing: I stumbled at first on Mastodon, but found that the bumps are only on setting up your account (wait, I have to pick a server? on what basis?), and then grasping how you follow other accounts. Once you’re on it, it’s perfectly easy to use, and there are A LOT of people there now!

      There is no “central Mastodon” — it’s a federation or network of servers. Your account will be something like @accountname@server.domain. Think of it like an email address. When you’re logged into your account on your server, and want to search for another user, you need to use their full address.

      Sometimes people share a link to their page, like http: // server . domain / accountname. If you click that link in order to follow them, you’ll be prompted to log into their server, which won’t work since you probably don’t have an account there. Just log into your server as usual, swap the components you see there around to @accountname@server.domain and search for them to follow them.

      You can start out by creating an account a big server like mastodon.social. If you do, you can always move to another server later — it’s pretty easy. Or you can look at the servers that your friends have chosen, and go to one of them.

    4. Blazer+990*

      If it’s anything like discord, I’ll pass. I just don’t understand how it works. I’m in my mid 30s but apparently behind the social media technology curve. :(

    1. Eldritch Office Worker*

      Twitter is one of the biggest social marketing platforms and remains to be until it’s actually run into the ground. I agree it’s not great, but I’m not begrudging people who rely on it to help move their product and have chosen to stay there until new avenues clearly emerge.

      1. L.H. Puttgrass*

        All true, but it’s also a bit like, “Yeah, Hell is awful, but all my friends are here.”

        I don’t begrudge Alison staying, but people like her are the ones who can help change the fact that everyone is there because everyone is there.

        1. Eldritch Office Worker*

          All due respect to Alison, her account has about 93k followers. Which is great for the reach she needs, but she’s not going to be a gamechanger in that way.

          1. L.H. Puttgrass*

            Ah, okay. I’ve never been on the Twitter, so I have no idea who has big followings and who doesn’t (or even what “big” means in terms of Twitter followings).

            In a just world, Alison would have all the followers.

          2. Emma*

            I think she should stick one to the Muskrat and leave anyway. It looks bad for an eminent management blogger to be sticking around on Twitter.

        2. Sloanicota*

          Such mixed feelings about this, as someone grimly hanging on at Twitter. I was required to create one for my sidegig and it still has reach at this point – that said, I obviously do not support Elon. On one hand, all the major platforms are evil; FB/IG and certainly TikTok. The platforms were always intended to turn their users into products for advertising at best, and often with far more nefarious intent. It’s also true that big influencers could boost some of the other platforms like Mastadon or Hive or whatever, but for myself I’m not sure I’d feel knowledgeable enough to certify that one of them is “the good one” and it’s not my core business to experiment on various platforms. I’m hoping for some sort of Hail Mary that changes the current trajectory.

          1. Eldritch Office Worker*

            Yeah I’d like to see an overhaul in the entire social marketing industry but “turns users into products” is so core to the concept I have a hard time envisioning a way out of that part.

            1. Wintermute*

              in order to be a business you need some path to making money. Heck even if someone started a not-for-profit or nonprofit social media network, the costs are pretty staggering. Even discounting the enormous cost of government compliance, especially in the US and EU, servers and bandwidth aren’t cheap nor are people capable of running a network of that scale.

              Given that they have to pay for it all somehow there are two viable models: people pay up front, or you monetize your user data. People seem much more comfortable with being monetized than they are with whipping out their credit card, so here we are.

              1. Five after Midnight*

                “government compliance in the US” – that’s funny…
                That aside, this is a really good summary.

                1. Wintermute*

                  It’s true– DMCA compliance is a HUGE pain in the butt and all requires human review because you must offer a counterclaim process, not to mention COPPA recordskeeping and other laws.

                2. Five after Midnight*

                  @Wintermute
                  I’m not disputing the cost of compliance with US rules if a company is doing things right. I was trying to indicate that US regulations are laxer, less burdensome, and not as strictly enforced compared to the European ones. Your reply is the case in point – the examples are from 1998; that’s 25 years ago. What regulations and customer protections have we seen enacted since? California is trying but federally there’s been little to no appetite for this.

                3. Misnss*

                  It’s not so much that there’s no appetite for regulation IMO as the attempts at regulation being bad or nonsensical in a variety of ways, and regulators/legislators not understanding the nuances of the internet or communicating with people who do. Just look at what happened post-GDPR: did sites stop trying to track us with cookies to comply with the regulation? Nope! Instead, we now get popups with convoluted opt-out-of-tracking processes on websites, designed to coerce you into just clicking “yes, track me, it’s fine”. The new legislation in California has substantial problems that essentially open the door to websites collecting detailed personal information on *everyone* under the guise of age verification (which…. will that information be transferred and stored securely?). FOSTA/SESTA have made it much harder for sex workers to make a living safely online, under the guise of curbing sex trafficking. There’s organizations like EFF trying to protect digital privacy and push toward legislation/regulations that actually provide consumer protections, but we need politicians/regulators to actually listen to what they have to say (or us, their constituents, when we point out problems with proposed legislation)

                5. Five after Midnight*

                  @Mianaai
                  This is a nuanced subject and this forum is not the best place for politics. So, I’ll just say this and leave it here: I agree there is desire for digital privacy and consumer protections from industry watchdogs and better-educated citizens, but it’s not going to get any traction because the US politicians are beholden to money and lobbyists instead of constituents. A substantial portion of which believes in “freedumb” anyway. So you end up with these monstrous do-nothing pieces of legislation arrived through meatgrinder of compromise which allow politicians to claim the sky but which in reality have no impact. Not to mention the fearmongering (see your FOSTA/SESTA example).
                  What you said aligns very well with my original comment – the US regulations are a (bad) joke.

        3. NerdyKris*

          Okay but there’s no other place to go. Mastadon is too fractured, Hive was a pipe dream that will take at least a year to ramp up to the point where it can handle even a moderate user base, Post social or whatever is sketchy.

          You can’t blame people for staying on the site as long as they can, fracturing communities tend not to have staying power. I’ve never seen one successfully migrate.

          1. Sloanicota*

            The only one I’ve seen is when fanfic moved almost en masse to AO3. Used to be Livejournal or FF.N or tumblr, and those sites all had features that A03 lack, but it was a pretty good mass migration.

            1. Hound Dog (Nothing But)*

              It was a mass migration, but a slow one. AO3 had been established for a couple fews years before Strikethrough and then the new owners of LJ, and FFN was a slowly sinking ship that took a while for people to realize. AO3 would have floundered if there had been a sudden upswing in users in the course of a couple months instead of years.

              1. Sloanicota*

                True, and like in the example with Hive or Mastodon, there are usually early adapters who check it out first, and the rest of us who are slow to move until we see/hear the momentum over a longer period of time – which is certainly how I feel about these new platforms.

            1. Not Your Admin Ass(t)*

              I love that you’re linking a Twitter thread from one of the Dreamwidth.org founders. :) DW is such a great blogging/social site. I hope it grows, but never to the point of, say, its source code-donor LiveJournal back in LJ’s peak days.

  5. Falling Diphthong*

    I really feel like this is the middle of a Leverage episode and somehow Alison is going to outwit the Big Bad via her new handle.

    1. Sloanicota*

      Man, there’s so many Leverage fans on AAM! I am one also, but I feel like it’s not a show everyone talks about. And true, or both this blog and Twitter would be very hackable by a pro who could make “Alison” say whatever they want!

      2. My Cabbages!*

        There was (and maybe still is) a commenter with the name “Damn It, Hardison!” and I heard it in Eliot’s voice every single time.

      1. Sloanicota*

        ZOMG I can picture the fanfic now. Alison brings them a case of an employee being abused in an only-legally-grey-not-illegal way. Then the team has to work together to bring down the rich and powerful. In the final scene, the employees start a union.

  6. What's in a name?*

    Might want to change the link at the top of the page to point to the new account. Or don’t, I want to see what they try to do with it.

    1. Wintermute*

      given they haven’t posted anything from it yet, my bet would be they’re waiting a little while for it to be harder to find out it’s fake (for the notice put up here to fade from the front page, etc) and then plan to use it in an upcoming crypto scam or shitcoin ICO, possibly something NFT as well. That’s the usual M.O. of twitter hijackers.

  11. Warrior Princess Xena*

    Massive shoutout to the remaining Twitter employees who are doing their best to keep us all safe online! Best of luck to you all and I hope that your situations improve.

  12. Sheworkshardforthemoney*

    I de-activated/deleted my account the day Musk took over and so far I don’t regret it or miss it.

  13. FormerEverything*

    I’m so glad!

    I know this is basically a throwaway comment, but I also know how, as a ‘service provider’ (widest possible use), you can get viewed as The Resource, like water or air, and people don’t respond when you’re not the firehose of information/support/etc.

    So I wanted to say I love your site & the work you do, and am so very glad you (or Twitter, omg) solved the hacking issue.

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