Twitter says it has “temporarily” turned off the SMS-to-tweet feature, after Jack Dorsey's account was compromised
which is a central way that many orthodox/hassidic jews access this platform—is ultimately being powered down for spreading antisemitic content https://www.adweek.com/... https://twitter.com/... Miss IG Geek / @missig_geek : Twitter: we designed the security on our service poorly, so now we're going to cripple it for everyone in countries with poor internet connectivity because someone inconvenienced our founder https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Jack Dorsey's account was hijacked over the Labor Day weekend by a group calling itself the Chuckle Squad, which posted racist tweets from it — an echo of 2016, when Twitter itself briefly suspended the CEO's account via an "internal mistake". Twitter's response five days later was not to fix its own tooling but to pull it: SMS-to-tweet, the channel the attackers apparently used, went dark "temporarily".
The framing matters because the corpus shows what "temporary" means at Twitter: seven months on, the company had also turned off SMS tweet alerts in most countries, converting an emergency measure into standing retrenchment. Critics like IG Geek argue the cost lands on users in low-connectivity regions — including Orthodox and Hassidic communities that rely on SMS access — who lose a channel because of a failure in Twitter's executive-account security.
First-order effects
- Users who post or follow Twitter over SMS — often in markets with poor internet connectivity — immediately lose tweet-by-text functionality, with no replacement channel announced.
- Twitter's own CEO becomes the case study: the same week the company must explain both the Chuckle Squad's takeover of Dorsey's account and its decision to disable a core access method in response.
Second-order effects
- The "temporary" disablement sets a precedent that hardens: by April 2020 Twitter had withdrawn SMS tweet alerts across most countries, so carriers and SMS-gateway partners see Twitter steadily exiting the channel rather than securing it.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, incident response at consumer platforms converges on feature removal instead of access-control repair — shifting the burden of connectivity onto the users least able to absorb it, and inviting regulatory scrutiny of how platform outages degrade service unevenly across regions.
The trend: Consumer platforms are responding to account-security failures by quietly retiring legacy access channels, trading reach among low-connectivity users for reduced attack surface.