Twitter hacked: panic and joy as verified users with blue tick forbidden from posting

There was panic and joy on Wednesday night when verified Twitter users were forbidden from posting, for approximately two hours, for the first time.

The unprecedented move followed the hacking of a series of high-profile accounts, including Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Kanye West and Apple.

In a scam message that began “I am giving back to the community”, multiple official accounts directed their millions of followers to deposit money into an anonymous Bitcoin wallet.

In a statement, the social media company said it locked down all verified accounts – identified with blue ticks or blue checks – to prevent the scam spreading.

“We limited functionality for a much larger group of accounts, like all verified accounts (even those with no evidence of being compromised), while we continue to fully investigate this,” Twitter said. “This was disruptive, but it was an important step to reduce risk.”

In the void, the majority of Twitter users flourished:

Some verified account users took painstaking steps to continue eking out

their thoughts – they could still retweet old tweets that summed up their feelings or laboriously construct messages out of single words and letters.

The election analyst, Nate Silver, pieced together: “Poll shows democrat leading” thanks to @everyword, a bot account tasked with tweeting out every word in the English language.

Musician Lil Nas X worked around the problem by creating a completely new, unverified account.

“Not LIL NAS” was created this month, and had no tweets or retweets until it was immediately retweeted by his official account.

The author and New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino had the foresight to avoid the whole issue altogether. But within hours, the utopian vision of a blue check-less Twitter had vanished, and normal service resumed.