The Twitterverse is full of far more mysterious forces than indecipherable trending topics and Lady Gaga.
There are people out there with dark, dastardly intents, as I learned when my account was hacked.
Now, anyone who knows me knows I love Twitter. I am a tweeting fool. I’ve tweeted from backstage at the Oscars and the red carpet at the Emmys. I’ve tweeted from baseball games and film festivals. I even tweeted from my hospital bed, sleep-deprived and loopy on pain meds, the day after giving birth to my son.
My husband often teases me: “Oh, sorry, didn’t mean to interrupt your Twittering, or whatever it is you’re doing.”
So yeah, I like social networking. And it’s not all narcissistic nonsense; I’ve never announced I was on my way to get a mani-pedi, for example.
But as the Associated Press movie critic, I’ll always link to my reviews and my colleagues’ good work, or I’ll retweet something funny from celebrities I follow, such as Jay Mohr ((at)jaymohr37) or Elizabeth Banks ((at)ElizabethBanks). I’ve made new friends through Twitter, like SportsIllustrated.com baseball writer Joe Lemire ((at)SI-JoeLemire, no relation), and stayed in touch with old ones, such as CNN’s Jackie Adams ((at)mochagurl).
So you can imagine how bummed I was last week — and how violated I felt — when I discovered someone had nabbed my Twitter feed and fired off about 100 tweets in a matter of minutes. Most of it was gibberish about drug charges, sex, the Galaxy Tab and Stephen Hawking. Some profanity, some weird trending topics. Lots of links, none of which I clicked on. It felt as if someone had broken in and rummaged through my stuff with their grubby little cyber paws.
Thankfully, the folks at the Twitter Trust & Safety Team noticed these uncharacteristic bursts of links and suspended my account even before…