There’s nothing new about racist, sexist, or pro-Nazi propaganda being passed around on Twitter; despite the company’s periodic and ostensible efforts to crack down on hate speech, it seems like our timelines are constantly being overflowed by the rantings of racist eggs—just like that time we took the world’s worst field trip to Hitler’s secret chicken farm, way back in 2nd grade. But said perfectly typical litany of shit—a shittany, if you will—did at least come from a novel source today, when it began spewing forth from the account of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.
Yes, Jack-o was on his hack-o this afternoon, as Dorsey’s account was flooded with racial slurs, off-color comedy, and promotions for the now-shuttered Discord server of the folks responsible for hacking into his account. People presumably noticed the takeover after Dorsey’s account switched from its usual stance of tacitly failing to condemn racist or offensive language, in favor of posting outright slurs.
Per The Verge, some of the tweets were up for as long as 10 minutes, a.k.a. 8 million years in online discourse time. (During that same period, the public perception of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time…In Hollywood managed to undergo six more backlash-lash-backlash cycles.) Twitter acknowledged the attack this afternoon, noting that @jack had been “compromised.” We have no idea how the company will respond to this obvious breach of its internal workings, or what kind of hard-core crackdown we can all expect, but if we had to guess: Maybe a new, extremely unreadable font for its mobile version? And possibly a feature that retweets promoted content into your feed every time someone you follow types the letter “e.”