Fort Bragg’s official Twitter page replied to sex worker’s tweets. It wasn’t a hack
When Fort Bragg’s official Twitter account sent public tweets to a sex worker Wednesday, the military base claimed it was hacked.
Now officials say it was an inside job.
The XVIII Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg confirmed in a statement Thursday on Twitter that “an administrator for the account identified himself as the source of the tweets.” Fort Bragg did not release the person’s name and it was not clear what punishment he faces.
This morning, at the initiation of an investigation into yesterday’s incident regarding inappropriate tweets on the Fort Bragg Twitter account, an administrator for the account identified himself as the source of the tweets. Appropriate action is underway.
— XVIII Airborne Corps (@18airbornecorps) October 22, 2020
Fort Bragg is a U.S. Army base in Fayetteville, North Carolina — about an hour and a half south of Raleigh.
Its Twitter account using the handle @FtBraggNC has since been removed, and a representative from the base did not immediately respond to a request for comment from McClatchy News on Thursday.
According to screenshots shared on social media before the page was taken down, Fort Bragg’s Twitter account sent at least two tweets between 4:25 and 5 p.m. on Wednesday replying to a sex worker’s page.
“Someone come get their fort,” she said in response to one of the tweets.
The account is run by a woman who operates what’s known as an OnlyFans page. OnlyFans is a content subscription service based in London that’s heavily populated by models and social media influencers who get fans to pay a monthly subscription fee “to view a feed of imagery too racy for Instagram,” The New York Times previously reported.
The woman Fort Bragg was tweeting has about 22,300 followers on her Twitter page — a figure she says grew after Wednesday’s debacle. Now she’s cashing in on the newfound fame with a 50% military discount for new subscribers.
“Hey guys, for whatever reason I’ve noticed an increase in followers in the past few hours so I just wanted to say thanks for that,” she said in a video posted to her Twitter account Wednesday night. “And that I put up a discount on my OnlyFans, if you’re interested.”
Fort Bragg tried to walk back the racy tweets shortly after they were posted by saying its account had been compromised.
“As many of you may know, there were a string of explicit tweets from our account this afternoon,” the base said in a Tweet just before 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday. “This was not the work of our admins. Our account was hacked. We apologize to our followers. We have secured our account and looking into the matter.”
An investigation early Thursday prompted the person responsible to come forward, according to the XVIII Airborne Division. In the meantime, Fort Bragg’s Twitter account has been removed for 30 days because of the report about a possible hack, a spokesperson told CBS17.
