Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Twitter has “temporarily” turned off the ability to tweet via text message just days after the feature was misused by hackers to tweet a racial slur, bomb threat, and other crude messages from the account of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.
The ability to tweet via text was important to Twitter in the service’s early days, but it’s more of a legacy feature at this point since most people rely on the smartphone app. The feature still exists, though, allowing you to text a number, such as 40404, and have that message posted to your account.
That can lead to real issues when someone’s phone number is stolen, which is a technique that hackers increasingly use to compromise accounts because phone carriers often don’t take care to properly secure…