Andy Grewal (Iowa) and Daniel Hemel (NYU) are two of the more active Tax Profs on twitter. Both have lost access to their accounts for different reasons.
Twitter suspended Andy's account (@AndyGrewal) as a result of a twitter conversation with a friend (Andrew Dhuey) over the proper response to the alleged controversy around Justice Thomas. Andrew argued that serious ethical violations had occurred and he sought a monetary penalty. I thought this was a grave overreaction. To illustrate my position, I sarcastically said that I would "prefer the guillotine" for Justice Thomas.
Twitter concluded that the tweet was an attempt to "threaten, incite, glorify, or express a desire for harm or violence:"
Many people, including Andrew, tried to explain that Andy's silly tweet did no such thing. But Twitter has rejected his appeals. Andy engaged in some self-help and is now tweeting on a new account (@ProfGrewal) but has lost thousands of followers.
Daniel (@DanielJHemel) took to Slate to announce My Twitter’s Been Hacked. But Hasn’t Everyone’s?:
The tweet itself was nothing remarkable: “The $STONKS airdrop is now live!,” it read, along with an emoji of an upward-trending market chart and a link to a website where you can “find out how many $STONKS tokens you’re eligible to claim.” Millions of similar scams circulate on the web every day, enticing the most gullible among us to give away their personal financial details in hopes of a cryptocurrency windfall. The only remarkable thing about the tweet—at least from my perspective—was that it was being retweeted by an account that, until this past Saturday, had been mine.
As a little-known professor writing little-read articles about federal and state tax law, I am far from the highest profile person to have had his Twitter account compromised. Hackers have commandeered the Twitter presences of—among many others—Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Kanye West, Bill Gates, and even Elon Musk, who now owns the cesspool-cum-social media site. A 2021 study by Security.org estimated that 22 percent of U.S. adults have been victims of “account takeovers.”
Most of those people are ultimately able to get their accounts back. In the celebrity cases, the takeover is usually countermanded in a matter of minutes or hours. I, alas, won’t be so lucky.
I realized that I could no longer log into Twitter using my password or email address when I went to check the site after reading a New York Times Magazine cover story about—ironically enough—how Twitter “broke our brains.” I appealed to Twitter Support for aid. Two days later, on Monday night, I received a response informing me that Twitter was “unable to verify” that I actually am the account owner. “We know this is disappointing to hear, but we can’t assist you further with accessing your account,” the message continued—seemingly acknowledging that it is indeed my account while also doubting that same fact. With at least 70 percent of the company’s pre-Musk staff now gone, I truly believe Twitter’s no-reply email address when it tells me that it just doesn’t have the bandwidth to help further.
And so @danieljhemel—the handle from which I once tweeted tax commentary to 9,000 or so followers—will now be the plaything of cryptocurrency scammers until they tire of it.
At least I’m in good company—because really, Twitter’s 300 million-odd regular users were all hacked months ago. So, too, were the billions more who get their news from Twitter-dependent journalists (which is to say, most of us in advanced economies). The social media site at the base of our informational food chain has been hijacked by a cryptocurrency hawker, and we’ll probably have to live with the fact that we can’t get it back.
