Twitter chaos and Trump reinstatement leave users worried about data

Twitter is in chaos.

Elon Musk, its new owner, has decimated its staff and this week gave those remaining an ultimatum — work grueling hours and be “extremely hardcore ” or leave. Hundreds chose the latter and headed for the door.

There are already signs that the exodus is stressing the system. Some users noticed problems receiving texts to sign in with two-step verification. Test pages are showing up in the wild.

Some users are seeing a renewed barrage of spam in direct messages and on their feed, while others complain of receiving new replies to long-deleted tweets and seeing saved tweet drafts disappear. Still, the bird site is chugging along.

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Twitter won’t simply shut down overnight. But security experts warn that the drastic job cuts may open the door to bad actors exploiting the platform’s vulnerabilities and compromising user accounts.

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SHUT DOWN THIRD-PARTY ACCESS

Jane Manchun Wong, an independent software and security researcher in Hong Kong who follows Twitter closely, recommends revoking permissions to third-party sites and apps through your Twitter account.

That’s because if there is a potential security problem with Twitter’s API (or Application Programming Interface, which lets third parties access Twitter data to create apps that work with Twitter, for instance) with fewer people working at the company, patching it up will inevitably take longer.

To turn off this feature, start in the “Security and account access” tool and go to “Apps and sessions.” Here, you should find all the third-party apps that have are connected to your Twitter account — including some you may have linked years ago that no longer exist — and you can revoke access to each one.

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PRESERVE YOUR FOLLOWERS LIST

While there’s no perfect replacement for Twitter — and of course Twitter is still here! — many users, especially those in journalism, tech and academia, are signing up for Mastodon, a previously little-known platform that launched in 2016.

Mastodon is a decentralized social network. That means it’s not owned by a single company or billionaire. Rather, it’s made up of a network of servers, each run independently but able to connect so people on different servers can communicate.

Signing on can be complicated — you will need to pick a “server” to join, but regardless of which one you choose, you can still communicate with people on other servers, kind of like how you can email people from your Gmail account even if they are on Outlook or another email server.

Once you’re in, you can go to fedifinder.glitch.me and find your Twitter following or any Twitter lists you might have to see if they also have Mastodon accounts. Many Twitter users are also listing other social networks and content information in their bios or even Twitter display names so people can get in touch with them — just in case.

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