Twitter Hack Exposed: Hackers Had an Inside Man, and Shadowbanning Confirmed?

Panic struck yesterday as hackers took over major Twitter accounts and start tweeting about Bitcoin. Now, I made the decision long ago that I'm not going to learn what a Bitcoin is and am comfortable in sticking with that. But apparently it's important enough for hackers to hack in to verified Twitter accounts to try to make some (bit)coin. Which brings us to this fascinating article from VICE.

VICE is reporting that the hackers had an inside man at Twitter who either took control of the accounts or gave control to the accounts to hackers. If you're surprised that random Twitter employees have that much easy control, you shouldn't be. It was a Twitter employee who "accidentally" suspended the president of the United States' account on their "last day of work." It's just never been done on this grand a scale before.

Which brings me to what I found most interesting from VICE: this screen capture of the control panel some Twitter employees have to control any account they want. Dare I say "shadowban" them if they felt like it?

The panel is a stark example of the issue of insider data access at tech companies. Whereas in other cases hackers have bribed workers to leverage tools over individual users, in this case the access has led to takeovers of some of the biggest accounts on the social media platform and tweeted bitcoin related scams in an effort to generate income.

One of the screenshots is a Twitter user posting images of the panel themselves. At the time of writing that account has been suspended.

"Shadowbanning" was always one of those things we knew was happening but couldn't prove. While this doesn't prove that it's happening, it at least lends evidence that there are employees there who have the power to shadowban if they feel like it. Like, if i were to shadowban someone, those would be the buttons I would press. Knowing the kind of people the leftists are who work for these big tech companies, you can't honestly say that it's not at least within the realm of possibility to do this. A group of cryptocurrency stans may have finally given us a lead to investigate further.

Considering that two of the accounts hacked belonged to a former president and former vice president of the United States, methinks those investigations are going to be happening rather quickly.

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