HECKUVA JOB, TWITTER: Wall Street Journal drama critic Terry Teachout’s Twitter account gets hacked; Twitter management yawns:

If you follow me at @terryteachout, I hope that you’ll move over to @TerryTeachout1 and share my new handle with your friends. I put a lot of energy into Twitter—I get great pleasure out of it—and I expect to continue to do so.

UPDATE: I received this message from Twitter Support late last night:

We’ve investigated the reported account and have determined that it is not in violation of Twitter’s impersonation policy. In order for an account to be in violation…it must portray another person…in a misleading or deceptive manner.

So that’s how Twitter Support responds when my verified account is hacked, obscene and racist messages are posted on it, and a ransom request is made to me by telephone. Is it any wonder that more and more people are getting fed up with Twitter?

No, it’s not. Or as Glenn writes in USA Today, “if you set out to design a platform that would poison America’s discourse and its politics, you’d be hard pressed to come up with something more destructive than Twitter. Twitter has the flaws of the old Usenet newsgroups, but on a much bigger scale.” 

(I’m currently taking a Twitter sabbatical, but I haven’t (yet) deleted my account.)