November 27, 2014 4.22 pm This story is over 112 months old

Lincoln MP lodges complaint with Twitter after explicit tweet

Twitter debate: The Lincoln MP has denied favouriting an explicit image on Twitter, claiming its the result of hacking.
Former Lincoln MP Karl McCartney. Photo: Steve Smailes/The Lincolnite

Lincoln MP Karl McCartney is asking Twitter to reassess its security features after a pornographic image was “favourited” on his account.

The Conservative MP said that his Twitter account may have been hacked after seemingly favouriting an explicit tweet featuring an image of a BDSM enthusiast.

The MP is not “following” the account who posted the image, and the image was favourited on another user’s retweet. He did not post the image from his account, or re-tweet it.

Since the incident, the MP has made a number of security changes, and denies that he has ever used the favourite feature on Twitter in the past.

According to his Twitter account, Karl McCartney has favourited a number of tweets in the past. However, after being called out by Lincoln’s prospective Labour candidate, Lucy Rigby, a number of these have since been deleted.

rigby_tweet

In a statement, Karl McCartney said: “It was brought to my attention earlier today by a number of people that a Twitter post from Lincoln Labour’s Prospective Parliamentary Candidate showed a pornographic tweet and around 50 other random tweets that had been ‘favourited’ on my Twitter account from the past four years.

“I have removed all ‘favourites’ from my account, I have reset my password and those who follow me regularly on Twitter will know that I have never been into the practice of favouriting tweets or images in my 6-7 years on Twitter and stick to posting or retweeting in the main (25k+) including at times images of interesting cars I see whilst out campaigning.

“I am writing today to Twitter to express my concern that six months from a General Election the security of Twitter accounts needs to be able to stand up to any malicious and salacious attempts to embarrass the account holder, I will await their reply with interest.”

Lucy Rigby also came under fire from Twitter users due to retweeting the image further, to which she deleted the image and apologised.