Sean Hannity's Twitter Was 'Compromised,' Vanishes

And conspiracy theories were rampant
By Newser Editors and Wire Services
Posted Jan 27, 2018 3:41 PM CST
Sean Hannity's Twitter Was 'Compromised,' Vanishes
In this March 18, 2016 file photo, Fox News' Sean Hannity speaks during a campaign rally for Republican presidential candidate, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, in Phoenix.   (AP Photo/Rick Scuteri, File)

Conspiracy theories flew Saturday morning after the Twitter account of conservative TV host Sean Hannity was "briefly compromised," according to a Twitter spokesperson, and unavailable for a few hours. The AP reports after the Fox News star's verified account posted a message that simply and cryptically said "Form Submission 1649," visitors to Hannity's page said they were getting a "Sorry, that page doesn't exist" error message. By the time Hannity's account was back up later in the morning, speculation was rampant about the mysterious disappearance. "While we normally do not discuss individual accounts, for privacy and security reasons, we have permission from the account owner to confirm that account was briefly compromised," a Twitter spokesperson said.

Some blamed shadowy "deep state" government figures looking to take down Hannity, who is a big supporter of President Trump. "The Deep State is in panic!" tweeted Alex Jones, a far-right radio show host. "Hannity disappears from Twitter after eerie tweet." WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange also took to Twitter to observe how Hannity had his account "mysteriously disappear." Other users were rooting for the theory that a rogue Twitter employee was behind the deactivation. That was Twitter's explanation for an 11-minute outage that took down Trump's twitter account in November. At the time, Twitter blamed a customer support worker on their last day on the job and said that it was implementing safeguards to prevent the situation from happening again.

(More Sean Hannity stories.)

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