My Twitter Account, @michaelferrell, Was Hacked and Stolen
Now I have to go inward and ask, Do I care?
My twitter account, @michaelferrell, was hacked and stolen and there doesn’t seem to be anything I can do about it. Now I have to go inward and ask, Do I care?
I’ve had this account since 2009, when twitter was new. My real name with no numbers. Actually a pretty valuable thing. But for many years, I used a different twitter handle, @mickeyfickey. Old college nickname. I kept @michaelferrell as well, of course.
In 2020 or so, I did the smart thing and closed @mickeyfickey down. Not that I’m important enough to be in danger of getting canceled, and not that there were any actually problematic tweets, but since it was just a long record of impulsive jokes and comments as I went through my 30s, shutting it down seemed the smart thing to do. Social media was turning into a place of vilification and conflict. Negative algorithms ruled the constant competition for attention and it wasn’t worth it to have old tweets anywhere. I switched to using @michaelferrell, made sure everything was positive, innocuous, and about filmmaking or writing.
I used it seldomly, twitter turned to X and got even worse, though it was still a decent place for a stream of curated news (I also have an anonymous soccer twitter, which comes in handy since soccer/real-football news in America is limited). Then, just before Christmas 2023, I noticed @michaelferrell was gone from my phone.
Stolen. Hacked. I couldn’t change the password, couldn’t get into the account. The person controlling @michaelferrell now was using it to reply to other people about bitcoin or something. The internet sucked @michaelferrell into an internet black hole that I don’t even understand. Or care to. I filled out the forms to contact twitter/x multiple times to get my account back. No matter what I tried, I just got an automated reply that said they weren’t going to do anything about it.
So now what? X, as it’s not-really-called now, is a sinking ship anyway. Instagram and TikTok currently rule the social media airwaves, it seems. But twitter/x definitely still has a lot of people on it, mostly arguing, yelling, fulfilling those negative algorithms. So I have to ask myself, do I care? I mean, as long as the dark-web-bitcoin guy doesn’t do anything more to infiltrate my social media or life, I lost a twitter account I wasn’t really using anyway, so maybe it’s fine. And I have no choice, apparently.
I am not @michaelferrell. And even though I grabbed the full-name-no-numbers early, I never was. Recently, I rediscovered crossword puzzles and bought a book of them. I used to love to do crosswords. My wife has been reading a ton of books and I have to say, I’m intrigued at the possibility of joining her in that strange activity. It’s not even that I was on twitter, I don’t even spend much time on other social media sites, it’s just that we have these online identities and we’ve become attached to them. Maybe too attached. There’s no problem with putting our best selves into the world, being our own publicists, it seems natural to do so. But it’s not really who we are.
Letting go of @michaelferrell is a little scary (mostly because it was stolen, I was robbed, and I have to look at “me” talk about bitcoin) but not too hard. I walk my dog, I go to work, I make dinner with my wife, I drink wine, I watch soccer. I don’t need it.
Not to get too deep, but follow me here. If @michaelferrell isn’t really who I am, what about Michael Ferrell? The guy who likes soccer, drinks wine. Is that really who I am?
The answer just might be no. I’m the one behind that guy, the one watching it all play out. I grabbed @michaelferrell when twitter was new. My parents gave me Michael Ferrell in the late 70s. But I’m just the one watching it all play out. Thanks for the reminder, stupid dark-web-bitcoin guy.