I am sort of baffled by all the ink being spilt about Twitter. I still find it jarring that anyone reports on “tweets,” and that there is even a process to ‘appeal’ a decision made ‘about a tweet.’
Anyway, meta-commentary aside, this blog post is something of a mystery. I don’t know whether the author of the post actually wrote the tweet in question and is somehow trying to get back onto Twitter, or if his account was compromised despite him saying it wasn’t… I just don’t know what to make of all of this. Can anyone clarify? Any insights?
FWIW, the author is very prolific and sane on hackernews(at least as far as I've noticed), so the post could be considered more trustworthy than a random post by somebody who has never participated here before.
As someone with a 15-year-old account here, I can verify that Jacques is in a special, small group of members of this community with recognized user names -- based on a long and impeccable record of substantial knowledge and respected expertise.
It fights the development of cliques and forces people to focus on the message, not the messenger. And it sharpens your own need to make a good point, rather than posting as $KNOWN_USER and waiting for the clicks.
I've done this roughly every ~1-2 years or so since I joined about a decade ago, so my ~8-9k of aggregated karma is spread across multiple accounts.
On that topic, it's about time to rotate to a new one. Catch you all on the other side ;)
>I still find it jarring that anyone reports on “tweets,”
Reporters love Twitter, so they spend a lot of time on it. If reporters spent a lot of time in D&D sessions, they would report about every typo in "Dragon" magazine.
Reporters love spending a lot of time on Twitter. It looks like work; it smells like work; but it is definitely not work.
Perhaps because there are sources posting on Twitter?
Reporters often rely on tips. It's like going fishing. If the oceans were full of fish and you wanted fish - surely spending time fishing would make sense?
Reporting on tweets is the modern version "man on the street" interviews from television news. That is to say, essentially worthless. They never tell you how many interviews they did or how many tweets they read before they found the one or two they chose to support their predetermined narrative.
> It's no different than reporting on anything else that someone says in a public forum.
Public forums, like in-person public forums, have much more context and many more barriers to being heard. In a supply-and-demand, signal-v.-noise sense, I find Twitter to be extremely low value, on the order of whatever the homeless fellow on my street shouts about (it’s usually extremely racist, homophobic, and disconnected from reality —- three traits his content shares with Twitter).
> Since there are real consequences for what you say in a public forum, it is understandable that there is an appeals process.
I don’t share the view that getting banned from Twitter is a ‘real consequence’ because I have never been on Twitter and yet, here I am, no worse for wear.
> I find Twitter to be extremely low value, on the order of whatever the homeless fellow on my street shouts about
A lot like the real world. If a homeless person is standing across the street from the Whitehouse shouting nonsense no one cares. If POTUS comes out and says we're going to war, it matters. That's why what people say on Twitter is reported on in the news.
The previous US president used Twitter as his primary form of public address. These are now part of the presidential archive. Like it or not, in 2022, Twitter is a first class medium for communication.
If somebody had that kind of an exploit of Twitter, is it really plausible they'd use it for such an inconsequential tweet and on your account? Seems like there would be far juicier targets.
That I agree with. Still, no indication at all that anything besides Twitter has been abused and believe me there are far juicier targets on this machine as well. So why just Twitter if someone has compromised my main work machine? That would really make no sense.
It is not unheard of as a distraction technique. Similar to flooding an inbox with spam mail so the "changed password" email gets missed in the flurry.
You could be spending all of your time trying to solve your Twitter issue while time is being taken to delicately extract some of those "far juicier" targets.
Not saying this is for sure, but just one reason why a malicious actor might act in this way. If you haven't done a full forensics on your main machine, you should be doing that before jumping to the conclusion that your machine is completely clean.
I don't write tweets like that, don't drink, don't get high (as another commenter suggested) and stand by my words. This is not something trivial to me, someone is apparently able to impersonate me on a platform with massive reach and that means that if this doesn't get resolved in a serious manner that Twitter is utterly dead to me. And that probably was the goal of whoever did this so I guess they can congratulate themselves on a job well done but I have to take this serious. Reputation is a pretty fragile thing, I'm very outspoken but I am very careful about what I write and if Twitter is not going to be serious about this then they have lost my interest instantly because it means that I can no longer trust what I read there and others won't be able to trust what I - apparently - write there.
Not necessarily, because the 'delete tweet' option is not visible on any page that I currently have access to, the only page that I get is the one where I have to enter my phone number.
I’m not sure by what evidence you came to this conclusion. The tweet exists. It exists with this person’s handle on it. This person claims that their account is not compromised.
From an Occam’s Razor standpoint, it doesn’t add up. I was looking for more evidence here, like “At that time I couldn’t possibly have tweeted, because it was the middle of the night and I have never tweeted at night,” or “The people who were the subject of the “@“ are not people I have ever interacted with, and the tweet itself doesn’t make sense in the context of the conversation.”
The general lack of detail and a lack of putting forth a theory of what did happen, besides “I support Ukraine so I might be getting silenced” (which seems unlikely — who doesn’t support Ukraine the West? It’s not an unpopular opinion. Is this guy Russian? And silenced by whom?) — it just plays like the song “It Wasn’t Me” by Rik Rok and Shaggy.
Anyway, meta-commentary aside, this blog post is something of a mystery. I don’t know whether the author of the post actually wrote the tweet in question and is somehow trying to get back onto Twitter, or if his account was compromised despite him saying it wasn’t… I just don’t know what to make of all of this. Can anyone clarify? Any insights?