- Ledger has removed the right for almost all Twitter users to comment on its posts
- Only those mentioned in the tweets or followed by Ledger can now comment
- Twitter users have been using replies to remind Ledger of the damage it caused with its massive data breach in 2020
Hardware wallet maker Ledger has quietly disabled the ability for anyone to reply to its tweets following months of backlash regarding last year’s mammoth leak. Ledger was forced to admit in December 2020 that the personal details of 292,000 customers were taken after its e-commerce database was compromised, since when almost every social media communication has been met with a flurry of complaints from affected users, none of which has received any kind of compensation. Having finally had enough, the company has now changed its Twitter response settings so that only those of its choosing can reply.
Ledger Masterminded Its Own Downfall
Ledger were in many ways the kings of its own downfall in 2020 when the denied that a hack on the Shopify network in May had led to its customer database being exposed. The company had nowhere to run the following month however when its own customer database was hacked thanks to a misconfigured API key. This was discovered in July and led to one million customer email addresses being stolen, alongside a subset of 9,500 customers who also saw full names, postal addresses, and telephone numbers breached.
By the end of the year it was clear that things were much worse, with the personal details of 272,000 customers uploaded for free to a data dump site. Ledger added 20,000 more to this tally in January this year, by which time the company’s Twitter reply feed had already become a seething mass of customer complaints. Soon, every tweet from the company on any subject was met with angry responses from affected customers, a pattern that continued well into 2021 and led us to ask what Ledger could do about it.
Digital Gag Applied to Tweets
It seems that Ledger has finally had enough and put a digital gag in its would-be respondents’ mouths. On July 30 it put out a tweet which only allowed Ledger-confirmed respondents to reply, blocking anyone else from doing so, a pattern that it have continued with every tweet since. While it is clearly bad for the brand’s image to silence its followers, it was perhaps worse for them to endure the daily anger that still quite rightly pours from the keyboards of those whose details were released to the public.
If anyone was in any doubt as to the necessity of such a move, the responses to Ledger’s last open tweet should shine a light on its decision:
In truth it was only a matter of time before Ledger took a step such as this, and one can only hope that silencing its critics doesn’t lead to anyone forgetting the damage that Ledger may have done with its actions over the past 18 months.
