Hack Someones Twitter and Post Something Funny
The Upside of Getting Hacked
Afterward an NFT bot stole my tweets, I had to reckon with why they meant so much to me in the get-go place.
Immediately later getting verified on Twitter, I started thinking well-nigh what I should write for my first blue-checked Tweet. It mattered considering Twitter verification proved I was a real writer, making this the countdown tweet of a real writer. Of course, a healthier marker of my writerly identity could have come from the years of bylines I'd accrued, or my bimonthly paycheck from The New York Times, or the fact that I spend most of the mean solar day every day … writing. But the encephalon worms of social currency had long ago convinced me that this piddling blueish cheque was fifty-fifty more valuable than those things. I needed that first tweet to be perfect—smart still hilarious yet effortless, which is of class a magic pull a fast one on requiring tremendous try.
Later on spending irreplaceable minutes of my mortal life puzzling over the task, it was solved for me: I was hacked. My commencement verified tweet was an unintelligible bot'due south nonsensical screed about NFTs. So were the three,000 tweets that followed. Non quite the effortless I had in mind, though I didn't lift a finger.
If you have a social media account, there's a possibility you're upward adjacent for existence publicly hacked. I don't mean to panic yous, just to ready y'all. I've watched both friends and celebrities get taken out on various platforms. In fact, it wasn't and then long ago that Elon Musk was hacked—on the very aforementioned app he offered billions to buy last month. There is no refuge fifty-fifty in death; they came for Gilbert Gottfried's account mere hours after his obituary was posted. Methods exist to protect yourself against this (complex passwords, two-cistron authorization) but I did both, and they—whoever they are—yet got me.
Mine was the best-instance-scenario version of a hacking. My hacker didn't access my DMs, and even if they had, there was nothing salacious there to reveal. No photos were leaked. They didn't attain my depository financial institution business relationship, my credit cards, or my electronic mail. Equally a NYT employee, I had access to the best minds on the security team, who worked with Twitter to turn my business relationship back to me in 24 hours. I could have been ruined; I was merely inconvenienced. As far as hackings go: non and so bad.
Only it was still bad enough! I watched in real time every bit my hacker replaced my photo with that of a drawing shark head (apparently an NFT), deleted my tweets, and started spewing out thousands of their ain under my name, tagging thousands of people over the adjacent several hours in an apparent ploy to directly clicks to a certain NFT drib. While trying to explain the experience to my 91-year-old grandmother, who's never owned a computer, I gave this comparing: Being hacked feels like being locked out of your dwelling while watching through the windows equally someone robs it. That sounds dramatic. I yet mean it. I had spent years curating this online self, this insouciant Twitter Dorie, and in a matter of minutes every trivial joke and observation I'd made, every link I'd shared, every public conversation I'd had with showrunners and essayists and researchers I admire—all of information technology was wiped clean and replaced with NFT nonsense. Yes, they were just my tweets. But they were mine.
I recognize, logically, that my internet ramblings exercise not matter. Compared with most media professionals (all of us theoretically "in the public middle"), I have a miniscule following. Even for those few people who do engage with my Twitter, "engaging" with tweets is the intellectual equivalent of blowing snot into a tissue—one 2d of warm connection followed past immediate disposal. I know that the physical world I inhabit is more important than the virtual one: In the hours afterward getting hacked, when there was nix left for me to exercise but wait, I watched ane of my favorite dance companies perform, then shared dinner at a succulent Korean restaurant with a friend I adore. In the glow of that experience, the concerns of little words on a screen, themselves only a coded sequence of 0'due south and 1's, should have ceased to thing entirely.
But the truth is, I could barely focus on the show or the meal. I kept fixating on everything I was losing, the uncertainty of what else could be lost. Now no one on the internet would know that I was likable or smart, I worried. This is, of class, an idiotic affair to worry about while sitting next to a real friend who finds you likable and smart in real life. And similar a real friend, she ordered two rounds of soju to marker the occasion, which softened the edges of my heed and helped me realize the trouble: Getting hacked felt similar being robbed considering I'd assigned real-globe value to a virtual product.
But that wasn't totally my fault, and it wasn't a total miscalculation. Twitter claims 330 million monthly users. It can entrap anyone, regardless of profession. For a writer, though, there is a degree to which an online persona is a career necessity. It's how I learn most what events and stories bulldoze the cultural narrative; it'southward how I forge relationships with other creatives; it's how I sharpen the tool of my own thinking. Especially for a writer similar me who dabbles in many genres—not just the commerce journalism of my day chore but also essays and screenplays—it'southward been a mode to connect with people outside my company Slack. My tweets are much faster to read through than an essay or a script—a click on my Twitter page confirmed my phonation and at to the lowest degree hinted at my comedic ability. Twitter matters. Information technology has ruined elections and propelled careers and ruined careers and propelled elections. It has introduced me to geniuses and idiots, harassers and friends. Of course it matters.
And yet, though I've enjoyed creating relationships with other writers and readers online, the fact is, none of those are real relationships, because none of it is really me. My online persona is just a flattened extract, a disembodied phonation polished through edits, whereas the existent me speaks loud and fast and with aggressive gesticulation—something only my friends know. While a "like" strokes my ego, it does non brand me experience equally good as people'due south laughter does. And of form, the pitch for this very essay was accepted on the footing of the ideas it contains—not my social media presence. When I lost my Twitter account, I wasn't mourning the death of some potential opportunity. It was that I felt like a office of me had died with the business relationship. "How will my grandkids know that I was pithy!??" I tweeted in jest afterwards, but really, I worried nigh it. In creating these online selves, nosotros effectively create our own immortalities. Zippo dies on the internet, the aphorism goes, and in fact, not even my deleted tweets are dead, existing in perpetuity on the Wayback Machine.
Only fifty-fifty that eternal chain of i'south and 0'south won't let me live forever. It won't make me matter. Getting hacked pushed me to face up the reality of why I posted in the first place; it wasn't just the fun of it, not just creative claiming or the job strategy. It was far more than pathetic than all that: Tweeting, for me, was an endeavour to matter, every like and follow some other confirmation of how much I mattered. I know, of course, that shouting into the void of the cyberspace does not make you matter, even if its echo will reverberate forever. Y'all can be immortal simply however too forgotten. When I tweeted, "How will my grandkids know that I was pithy!??," I was framing the question incorrect.
I don't wish for you to get hacked, only the experience rattled my soul and fabricated me reconsider how I use the internet, a reckoning that was frankly overdue. I withal think Twitter is a powerful tool for a writer, mayhap even for a normal person. Merely I am trying to let go of its power to verify my worth. I yet get a little satisfaction whenever a mail gets attending, merely in the weeks since the hack, I've spent less fourth dimension using the app, and less free energy as well. Even if it survives until then, I realize, my digital footprint will not matter in 100 years. It barely matters today. My grandkids will have to know I'1000 funny only by knowing me, and I guess so will I.
Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona Land University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.
Source: https://slate.com/technology/2022/05/twitter-hack-nft-social-media-free.html
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