Anthony Weiner’s “Facebook Hacked” Excuse Is Limp… um, Lame.

If for some reason you haven’t heard about what happened on Twitter regarding Congressman Anthony Weiner, go here to BigJournalism and see the original report.

Rep. Weiner claims that his Facebook account was hacked. We were unable, at this late hour, to reach anyone at Conressman Weiner’s offices for comment.

This is where Weiner screwed the pooch. He claims his Facebook was hacked. There is an option to link your Facebook and Twitter accounts. But if you compare Weiner’s accounts (Facebook and Twitter), you’ll note there’s hardly any correlation. So if Weiner is to be believed, he has his accounts linked but has hardly every used the integration. That’s Strike One.

The tweet in question was of a picture posted on Weiner’s yfrog.com account not Facebook. The Congressman uses Tweetdeck, or some other third party Twitter client, and yfrog is the photo sharing service he selected in the settings. That means when he tries to attach a picture file to a tweet (or in this case probably a direct message) it gets uploaded to yfrog.com which returns a url for the recipient to click and see the file. Facebook has nothing to do with this process at any point. Strike Two.

The third strike is the most damning. The Congressman deleted the incriminating picture, and all the pictures (if there were any there are none now), from his yfrog profile before saying anything about the alleged hack. The victim of a hack like that would have responded differently. Something along the lines of “Dear Followers, I did not send out that picture and I’ve notified the authorities that my account has been hacked.” Weiner made a joke, instead. Secondly, the recipient of the tweet deleted her Twitter account instead of, say, going “OMG! Somebody must have hacked Anthony Weiner’s Twitter!” like a normal human being who randomly received an unsolicited picture of someone’s bulge would do. Clearly, the recipient realized what had just happened and panicked and made the decision of a guilty person, not a random victim of a hacker.

What’s that? You thought I was done at three strikes? Oh no.

Strike Four: Why would a hacker choose ONE person to tweet that picture to? The tweet in question would only have been seen by mutual followers of the recipient and the Congressman. Any “hacker” who would go through the trouble of figuring out Weiner’s password would have the Twitter know-how to put the link before the recipient’s handle, not after. This way all of the people who follow the Congressman would see the tweet and the embarrassing photo. I mean, why bother going through the effort? The “hacker” would have one shot at this. Why not go for maximum impact with a simple maneuver (putting the url first)? The hacker would have tweeted multiple people, too. Maximum impact.

No, what we have here is a Congressman – maybe feeling a little cocky over a perceived victory earlier in the day – being sloppy and not realizing what he had done until notified by someone (probably the recipient) through some other channel (like email). He thought he was sending a naughty picture via direct message and hit the wrong little button and didn’t realize the yfrog service wasn’t private.

It takes a willful suspension of logic to accept the Congressman’s version of events. Not one aspect of this “hack” has to do with Facebook.

He was panicking.

UPDATE: For the record, this was not the incriminating picture. I repeat, NOT the incriminating picture. (h/t @JoeBrooks)