I spent nearly 15 years growing an audience on the social network. Losing it was a godsend.
I still remember exactly where I was when I realized I’d lost control of my Twitter account. I woke up one morning in March of last year to an email, delivered sometime in the middle of the night, stating that the password on my Twitter account had changed. I had just returned from my bachelor party, which involved bookending a long weekend of heavy alcohol consumption with cross-country flights. No longer as spry as I was in my 20s, I was coming up on my second (third?) day of recovery at home in Los Angeles. I recall being partly delirious while futilely trying to log back into my account. I had two-factor authentication enabled; had I accidentally accepted a login request in my post-bacchanal stupor? Did I even recall getting a notification before the password change? More importantly: Was this really happening to me?
I started my Twitter account just over 15 years ago, on July 4th, 2009. I had just graduated from college into a post-2008 financial crisis economy and was spending the summer in Washington, D.C., desperately hunting for a job in journalism. These were among the earliest days of social media’s capture of America’s news-industrial complex, back when Twitter was a place for real-time news like Sully Sullenberger’s “Miracle on the Hudson” commercial jet landing off of Manhattan. I had no idea that Twitter would soon become the dominant engine at the core of journalists’ media diets; what I did know was that jobs like “social media manager” kept cropping up on job boards and newsletters (and in my friends’ LinkedIn bios, for some reason!) and most of those jobs seemed to involve posting to Twitter.
