Hacked

My Twitter account was hacked a few days ago. I learned about it via several emails from Twitter. This is one:

Whoever hacked my account changed my email address:

Twitter obviously knew my user name–@jhinderaker–and my email address. I followed the instruction to contact Twitter support right away. That is when the trouble started. Twitter responded to my help ticket by telling me they have no record of my existence:

And more:

I have been on Twitter since 2008 and have around 14,000 followers, but they “were not able to locate any history of an account with this email and username.” Despite the fact that they had emailed me, using that username, at that email address, just the day before.

I then made eight or nine attempts to alert Twitter to my account being hacked, using their help function. But I was immediately foiled because the first thing you have to do is put in your username, which they kept telling me they’d never heard of.

Finally I came up with a workaround and sent them my story. I have no idea whether they received it. I have heard nothing from Twitter. If you try to access my Twitter account now, this is what you see:

I have no idea whether Twitter will ever restore my account. I don’t care much. I almost never actually go on Twitter, and only use it to push out some of my Power Line posts. I may just abandon Twitter; I also have a Parler account, where my username is also Jhinderaker.

Was this part of Twitter’s war on conservatives? I don’t think so. I was not that big a deal on Twitter, and there is no reason to doubt that someone from Australia (or wherever) hacked in and changed my email address, as Twitter originally told me. It seems like a clear case of incompetence. Which is reassuring, in a way. Big Tech is trying to push leftism on the rest of us, but if they are so incompetent that they can’t find any record of a user the day after they email him, they may not be such a threat to the rest of us.

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