Someone hacked my X feed over the weekend. Nothing on the feed since December 7, 2024 is my work. (My last post was a repost about St. John’s basketball). My X biography was altered (it has now been wiped clean) and the hacker is using my account to write about cryptocurrency.
So far the folks at X are of little help. I spent a few hours last night filling out help forms and getting emails from X asking me to fill out more forms. I have absolutely no control over the account. It is now operating under a different email address.
Our webmaster at Current tells me that when hacks like this happen it is very difficult to get the account back. He suggests I open another X account and try to rally people to write tweets demanding that X return my account to me. I don’t have time for this kind of social media campaign. Right now I just want to be done with X. But it would be nice to get my 20K followers back so I can continue to share the good work we are all doing here at Current.
I am not really frustrated or angry about losing a platform I have built over the course of nearly fifteen years. My approach to the intellectual life has never been suited for X anyway. I can post something on X and lose hundreds of followers in one day. And then I can say something else and gain a few hundred followers. X does not reward people like me. It rewards the kind of posters who sing one ideological note. In this sense, what is said on X doesn’t reflect real life. Even the so-called “activist historians” on X must know, deep in their heart of hearts, that the subject they are ranting about is more complex and nuanced than an X post allows. But why bother with nuance when you can get tens of thousands of followers. Most people who join X want to find accounts that confirm their already held convictions. When a tweeter suddenly starts writing things that might question those convictions, followers feel betrayed and start to “unfollow.”
No, what I am really frustrated or angry about is the fact that I now live in a world where ideas are measured by likes and retweets and followers. Publishers–even Christian publishers–seem to only care about platforms. I’ve been seduced by that world. In fact, I’ve been blogging and posting on social media long enough to have helped create that world. I’ve built a significant part of my intellectual life on this house of cards. And now I appear to be trapped in it. I can’t even delete my own X account.
Maybe I’ll feel different in the morning. But right now I needed to say this.
In the meantime, you can still find me sharing Current material at Facebook (John Fea’s Author Page), BlueSky, and Threads.
There has been a fake Facebook account under my name for years. I’ve reported it, as have others, but Facebook never did anything with fixing this, at least not yet. So in my opinion, Facebook has account integrity problems too. Nevertheless, I hope you get your X account back, and that you will continue to maintain an account on X.
Thanks, David. If I do get the account back, I don’t think I will do much beyond just posting what we publish at CURRENT. I think they all have problems. Right now everyone is loving BlueSky, but I am guessing that it too will go the way of Twitter.
Thanks for this, John. I’ve found you on the other social sites, and resonate with your angst that Christian publishing seems to award platforms above all right now. In a fit of fury, I deleted my X account post election, and don’t have the bandwidth to work on my other social media platforms, though I can see them as mostly positive places so far. The trolls are starting to filter in there, too, though, and I’m mostly despairing about social media and its corrosive impact on me and on my students.
Sorry to see that it appears that X still hasn’t done anything to fix your account.
But I do see that Current still has an account, at least. @Current_Pub1 on X