More than 166,000 followers of Neil Young’s Twitter account got a nasty shock on Friday when the Canadian music legend stopped plugging his new record of folk covers and began promoting pornography.
Thankfully the 68-year-old hadn’t lost the plot and begun posting some NSFW images of himself, but instead his account was hacked and flooded with pornographic material form other sources over the course of the weekend.
As Mashable reports, on Friday night hackers changed Young’s display handle to ‘SLUT FOR THE D’, his location tag to ‘Whore Island’ and began furiously posting expletive-filled tweets, sexually explicit imagery, and re-tweets of a popular porn site, all with the accompanying hashtag #neilslayed.
On Saturday, one tweet acknowledged that the account had been compromised, telling followers to “disregard my last few tweets” adding that the issue “has now been resolved and taken care of.” However, many more porn-endorsing tweets began appearing afterwards.
Another post from the compromised account accused two other Twitter users of being behind the hack, but it’s unclear if this was Young temporarily regaining control or an attempt to frame others for the account breach.
All the offending tweets have since been deleted, but not before some users screen-capped some of the hacked tweets (as seen below).
(Source: reddit)
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Young’s management have since been in contact with Twitter to restore the account to its rightful owner, as John Hamm, the CEO of Young’s audiophile music service PonoMusic (no r), confirmed to Mashable.
The account appears to be cleaned up now, once again promoting Neil Young’s new album, Letters To Home, a collection of vintage covers recorded in the Voice-O-Graph booth of Jack White’s Third Man Records.
Meanwhile, Pono Music is set to ship the first dedicated PonoPlayers over the next few months to backers of the record-breaking Kickstarter campaign, which generated over US$ 6 million – more than 7.7 times its humble goal of $800,000 – making it the third biggest funded project ever on the crowdfunding platform (the other two being the Pebble smartwatch and Ouya gaming console).
