Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman tweeted on Wednesday that someone is using his IP address to download child pornography, and suggested that it “could be an attempt to Qanon me.”
Qanon refers to the far-right online conspiracy QAnon which alleges that President Donald Trump is secretly working to unmask and take down a global network of elite pedophiles, who are in turn working with the so-called “deep state” to take down his administration, according to Mediaite.
Krugman, who famously predicted in 1998 that the internet would be no more consequential than the fax machine, tweeted:
“Well, I’m on the phone with my computer security service, and as I understand it someone compromised my IP address and is using it to download child pornography. I might just be a random target. But this could be an attempt to Qanon me. It’s an ugly world out there. “
An IP address is a number assigned to each device connected to the internet that allows devices to be addressed to a specific location of the user. Most of the billions of computer users don’t know what it’s for, “because even though it’s your passport to the Internet, you never have to think about it,” according to WhatsMyIPAddress.com.
Twitter skeptics had a lot of fun with Krugman’s tweet, questioning his understanding of internet security and the logic of tweeting about it in the first place.
“Your email could be compromised. Your website could be compromised. Various online accounts could be hacked. Saying your IP address is “compromised” is like my “hone address has been compromised & I’m not responsible for that package I ordered sent there”, Starshine Martin tweeted.
“So you decided to type this out and hit send?” asked Strong ETH .
“Think Mrs. Krugman will buy it?” Thomas Elliott wondered.
Krugman won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2008 for his work on international trade with increasing returns to scale.
Listen to GHOGH with Jamarlin Martin | Episode 68: Jamarlin Martin
Jamarlin talks about the recent backlash against Lebron James for not speaking up for Joshua Wong and the violent Hong Kong protestors.
Social media users questioned Krugman’s motives for posting the tweet.
“It is of course possible that someone hacked his computer and used it as a server for illegal conduct. That does happen. But man oh man, why post something like THAT at this phase? Utterly incomprehensible,” Mike Cernovich tweeted.
Priscilla Pilon tweeted that Krugman should have taken a lawyer’s advice, not a PR person’s: “Sounds like it’s an ugly world inside your world. In the lawyer verses PR hire, you took the wrong person’s advice. No lawyer would have let you put that out into the universe. A Hollywood publicist, maybe…”
“So, you got caught. Got it!,” Mainer tweeted.
