Twitter handles of Obama, Biden, Musk hacked to solicit digital currency

Twitter prevents at least some verified accounts from publishing messages after 'worst hack of a major social media platform'.

A series of high-profile Twitter accounts were hijacked on Wednesday, with some of the platform's top voices--including U.S. presidential candidate Joe Biden, reality television show star Kim Kardashian, former U.S. President Barack Obama, billionaire Elon Musk, and rapper Kanye West, among many others--used to solicit digital currency.

Nearly two hours after the first wave of hacks, the cause of the breach had not yet been made public. In a sign of the seriousness of the problem, Twitter took the extraordinary step of preventing at least some verified accounts from publishing messages altogether.

It was not clear whether all verified users were affected but, if they were, it would have a huge impact on the platform and its users. Verified users include celebrities, journalists, and news agencies as well as governments, politicians, heads of state, and emergency services.

Twitter did not offer clarification but said in a statement that users "may be unable to tweet or reset your password while we review and address this incident."

The unusual scope of the problem suggests hackers may have gained access at the system level, rather than through individual accounts. While account compromises are not rare, experts were surprised at the sheer scale and coordination of Wednesday's incident.

Twitter users unable to automatically post tweets to Facebook: Here's why

Twitter's support team tweeted on Thursday after users reported they were not able to post publish tweets on Facebook.

With Facebook cutting off access to its API platform for hundreds of thousands of apps, Twitter users are no longer able to tweet and retweet automatically on their connected Facebook accounts.

Facebook has deprecated its Publish actions permissions from its API -- a feature that allowed apps to publish posts on the social media platform as the logged-in user.

Ime Archibong, Vice President of Product Partnerships at Facebook, said all apps using the Facebook Platform APIs would need to go through a more comprehensive review to better protect people's Facebook information.

The deadline was August 1 to submit for review for all existing apps.

"As a result, we are cutting off API access for hundreds of thousands of inactive apps that have not submitted for our app review process," said Archibong.

Twitter's support team tweeted on Thursday after users reported they were not able to post publish tweets on Facebook.

"We've learned that Tweets and Retweets will no longer automatically post to connected Facebook accounts due to a recent Facebook update," said Twitter Support.

"Don't worry, you have other ways to share a Tweet," it added.

"According to Facebook, anyone wanting to have Twitter content automatically post to Facebook has the option to use Facebook's Share dialogs for web, iOS and Android," said marketingland.com.

"You have the option to share via Direct Message with your followers, or through an SMS or email to your contacts from your phone's address book," said Twitter Support page.

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Is the user real? Twitter to confirm new accounts in fight against bots

The requirement will be rolled out later this year, and Twitter promised to make sure the change does not harm aspiring users.

Twitter has said it will begin asking for email addresses or phone numbers to confirm new accounts as part of a battle against manipulation, particularly by automated bots.
Adding a way to check that a real person is behind new accounts was described by Twitter as being among measures to fight abuse, trolls, and hateful content.
"This is an important change to defend against people who try to take advantage of our openness," Twitter executives Del Harvey and Yoel Roth said in a blog post.
The requirement will be rolled out later this year, and Twitter promised to make sure the change does not harm aspiring users in "high-risk" places.
Twitter recently began taking more steps to clean up spam and automated activity, and "close the loopholes they'd exploited," according to Harvey and Roth.
"We're also now automating some processes where we see suspicious account activity, like exceptionally high-volume tweeting with the same hashtag, or using the same @handle without a reply from the account you're mentioning," they said.
Twitter systems identified and challenged more than 9.9 million "potentially spammy or automated accounts" weekly in May, according to Harvey and Roth.
Twitter last month said that it was stepping up its long-running battle against online trolls, trying to find offenders by looking at "behavioral signals." The new approach looks at behavioral patterns of users in addition to the content of the tweets, allowing Twitter to find and mute online bullies and trolls.
Even if the offending tweets are not a violation of Twitter policy, they may be hidden from users if they are deemed to "distort" a conversation, Twitter said.
Twitter already uses artificial intelligence and machine learning in this effort but the latest initiative aims to do more by focusing on the actions of certain users in addition to the content.

Twitter is among online platforms under pressure to do more to safeguard against being used to spread misinformation or promote division, as proved the case during the US presidential election in 2016, in which US intelligence says Russia meddled to help Donald Trump win.