Not ideal.
Working from home has its benefits and its downsides, and the downsides were never more evident than this incident involving the US Strategic Command Twitter account this week.
Managing the social media of a major military power comes with a lot of responsibility, especially when said account runs the country’s powerful nuclear weapons force.
This week, the account tweeted what seemed to be a string of gibberish “;l;;gmlxzssaw,” but it had people online initially scrambling to discover the meaning behind it.
US Strategic Command just tweeted this 😬😬😬 pic.twitter.com/2vR465AAUl
— Caleb Hull (@CalebJHull) March 28, 2021
The explanation was rather simple. It was not secret leaked military codes or anything of the sort, as some people joked online. Although it was also used by followers of QAnon to further the conspiracy theory online.
In fact, a child belonging to one of the employees had gotten access to the account and decided to provide their insight on the world, by randomly pressing keys and accidentally sending a tweet.
Basically the nightmare of every social media manager ever.
It was then followed up with a tweet telling people to disregard the previous tweet before both messages were eventually deleted.
“The Command’s Twitter manager, while in a telework status, momentarily left the Command’s Twitter account open and unattended. His very young child took advantage of the situation and started playing with the keys and, unfortunately, and unknowingly, posted the tweet,” Stratcom official Kendall Cooper told the Daily dot.
“Absolutely nothing nefarious occurred, i.e. no hacking of our Twitter account.”
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