Just a comment about internet safety on this whole Michael Sheen Twitter thing, from someone who tries to be overly cautious on social media (and who has had years and years of annual anti-phishing training that had to be taken very seriously in my job):
David Arnold, everyoneâs favorite Good Omens soundtrack composer, had to abandon his Twitter account and moved to Bluesky a month or so ago because his account was hijacked and Twitter was zero help in getting it back. Now, David Arnold probably doesnât have the immediate name recognition of Michael Sheen, but he isnât exactly some random schmuck either.
The first thing a hacker is going to want to do is change the access to the account, so that the account owner canât get into it. If Michael Sheenâs account was hacked, it seems unlikely that Michael Sheen himself would be able to almost immediately then access said account after it was brought to his attention to make a post saying âhey, something is weird, Iâm looking into it.â And then follow it up 6 hours later, on a weekend, with another post saying everything was fixed, with a weirdly specific list of everything that was done and a generic apology âto anyone affectedâ. (Yet at least one of the two comments that triggered all this is still up, last I checkedâIâd think heâd want to remove something he didnât post? Even if a post is deleted from display, itâs not like deleting a post you make entirely removes it from all of a platformâs servers.)
The point isâŠdolphins. My point is that I hope any Good Omens fans who are still on Twitter employ a healthy degree of skepticism right now, especially if Michael Sheenâs account suddenly starts trying to interact directly with you. And hopefully this goes without saying, but if youâre asked for personal identifying information, financial information, or for a donation to something, please donât fall for it.
If his account was hacked, there is no way of verifying that the âlooking into it/all fixedâ posts were actually posted by him. And if youâre someone whoâs going to hack a celebrityâs account, maybe to use it to scam people, the first thing you want to do is try and defuse suspicion. Which is exactly what Iâve seen happen here: a lot of people got upset and were immediately suspicious, but then immediately dropped the whole thing based on nothing other than a new post from the same account. No shade intended at all. Most of us want to think the best of other people, and that can be manipulated by scammers. It wouldnât even be the first time someone has tried to use Michael Sheenâs name to scam people.
The only communication about the potentially compromised account is happening on the potentially compromised accountâmost people who get hacked post on another platform that theyâre active on that the other account has been hacked, and that hasnât happened here
The two posts about the account being compromised seem to be worded very generically and impersonally
It seems slightly implausible that the whole thing was resolved in a few hours on a weekend, when other people in the public sphere had to abandon their accounts after having them hijacked because Twitter was unable or unwilling to assist with recovering them (especially in the current iteration of Twitter with a very stripped-down staff)
Feel free to ignore all this, and I hope Iâm wrong, but the whole thing felt a little sketchy to start with and frankly doesnât feel any less sketchy now. A little skepticism on the internet can be good for you.
