Image via Complex Original
Tweeting is a fine art: if your tweets are lame, your follower count will be low, and you'll essentially be tweeting to an audience of one (just you.) If you're a good tweeter, you'll pick up your base and become Twitter famous, but remember, with great power, comes great responsibility—and you can't always blow your mistakes off by blaming them on a hacker. Take, for instance, some recent celebrities who have resorted to using the "hacker" excuse, when anyone with a brain can see right through the lie. Be better than them. Here are The Lamest Excuses for Twitter Hacks—be careful what you tweet, and trust no one.
The Republicans Did It
Anthony Weiner got himself into some deep shit, multiple times, thanks to Twitter. Weiner first blamed the Republicans—before he paid an investigator $41,000 to find out who "hacked" him with that weiner sext—for hacking into his account to try to tarnish his reputation. C'mon, the Republicans can't run the government, let alone run a Twitter account.
You Went Passive Aggressive and Wanted to Be a Hater
Oh, you wanted to be a hater and tweeted out something crazy to someone else? Own up to it, you can't blame everything on a hacker. That's too much of an easy out, and social media already lets you "road rage" on the digital highways. If you're going to let your thoughts be known, own up to it. Don't be that person on the street that flips off another driver and quickly drives away. Be a man and back up what you say, like LeSean McCoy, in this instance.
You Didn't Want to Piss Off the Company That Just Hired You
Did BlackBerry just hire you as their spokeswoman, but you still prefer your iPhone? Cool, but keep that under wraps. Some Twitter apps will let followers know what you used to tweet, like the kind of phone you have. Alicia Keys learned this the hard way, and considering that she also posted a picture of herself with two iPhones, she was off to a rocky start as BlackBerry's spokeswoman. Of course she blamed it on hackers, but at that point, c'mon already.
Leaving Your Laptop Open With Friends Around
So, you really got hacked. First rule of social media is DO NOT LEAVE YOUR LAPTOP OPEN WHEN YOU LEAVE. Especially if you're still in college, have room mates, a brother, or your friends are always over. You'll get hacked ASAP with the quick tweets "I'm gay," or "I like it in the butt" or something. You should know this by now. Close your laptop: it only takes two seconds for you to get back to what you were doing. That's better than your friend tweeting out an embarassing picture of you and you don't find out about it until hours later. Tweeting out that your "friends did it" doesn't mean everyone that saw your embarassing tweet will see this one.
Setting Your Phone Down and Leaving it Unattended
We use our phones more than our laptops nowadays, so make sure you put a good password on your phone. And no, "1234" isn't going to work. Pick something your friends can't guess, and set your phone's settings to require a password as soon as the screen goes off—don't let that kick in 5 minutes or 10 minutes later, that's too long. This ain't no excuse—if you want your Twitter to be clean (expecially if you have a few thousand followers), make sure you lock down the fort. Being careless isn't an excuse.
You Wanted to Get Revenge
Back when Kat Stacks started a Twitter beef with Carmelo Anthony, Melo decided to cut it short and get straight to the point, placing a bounty on her head for anyone were to slap her. He quickly deleted the post, and his account, and blamed the tweet on a hack after Stacks said she would contact the authorities. Considering that Melo tweeted just after that tweet, even Stevie Wonder could see Melo wasn't hacked.
You Tried to Get Some With a DM
If you're going to hit on a chick with Twitter, you usually move from some flirtatous tweets to the DM. But always make sure when you're sexting a DM, sext with an actual DM and not a tweet. Ray Allen paid the price for this when he sent this tweet out, which was obviously meant for a private convo. He blamed it on a hack, but I guess that's the only thing you could do to save face at that point, especially when you have a wife.
When You Jumped the Gun and Tried to be Nostradamus
Okay, so you're cocky. We all get a overzealous every once in awhile (hey, it's better than being insecure), but if you're going to attempt to be Nostradamus and predict your success in front of potentially hundreds of thousands of people, you better hope it comes true. If you're on your college football team, don't go tweeting out "we're winning tonight" and try to blame it on a hacker when you lose.
PR
Back in July, Chipotle had the bright idea of staging its own hack, since, you know, hacking is all the rage. So, over the course of a few hours, its Twitter account, @ChipotleTweets, sent out incoherent tweets. And wouldn't you know it: the followers came coming after word spread of the "hack." A short time after, Chipotle owned up to the self-hack, and admitted they wanted to create some buzz. How meta.
You Don't Know What "Hacking" Means or How Twitter Works
If you don't know how to use Twitter on your phone or computer, you can't always blame a hacker for that. Also, you don't have to tweet out every little problem you run into. Real hackers have better things to do with their time.