YUSU took two months to respond to a complaint regarding the alleged hijacking of the LGBTQ Twitter account by former part-time officer Jack Chadwick.
LGBTQ student Callum Shannon complained about the inflammatory tweets posted from the account, including “#killallwhite men,” only to receive a response from YUSU two months later saying they couldn’t do anything about it.
The YUSU staff member who oversaw the investigation told Shannon in an e-mail response to his two-month old complaint: “I was informed at the time that the account had been hacked.
“Our IT person was able to gain access and the account was subsequently handed over to the new officer team.”
York Vision cannot name this staff member under the YUSU staff charter.
After being accussed of hijacking the LGBTQ Twitter account by Huw James, the LGBTQ Network gay convenor, Chadwick claimed that the account had instead been hacked.
Chadwick retweeted several inflammatory tweets, which reflected his extreme views, from the LGBTQ account during the incident.
The staff member insisted nothing could be done, telling Shannon: “While elected officers are subject to accountability rules, I was not able to establish that the account hadn’t actually been hacked, and given the post-holder had no official role around the period of the events in question, the accountability rules didn’t offer any further measures that seemed appropriate given the situation.
“I appreciate I should have informed you of this at the time but please let me know if you have any questions.”
Unimpressed, Shannon slammed the response: “They seem to have completely dropped the ball on it despite the fact that several students had death threats tweeted at them (potentially by an officer but as YUSU can’t be bothered to investigate properly I suppose we’ll never know) and union property was publicly damaged.
“The tweets were left up for weeks after the incident, and even if the account was hacked, the officer in question still committed misconduct by not deleting them.
“Also the fact that it took them two months to come up with this non-response and several reminders on my part before they even bothered to say anything is deeply worrying.
“Regardless of who was behind this, it really seems like YUSU doesn’t care about us, which is, quite frankly, very upsetting.”
It would be very, very easy to tell if the account has been hacked, since Twitter stores the location and IP of every login made to the account. Anyone with access to the account could easily see where those tweets came from.