ClaimsSteven Pinker

“This account was hacked earlier this evening, fortunately in a pretty obvious way.”

Steven Pinker, on X 20 June 2024 Post by @sapinker on X, 2024-06-20 (X)

Factual Their own work or organisation

Pinker's X account was hacked earlier on the evening of 2024-06-20.

Unresolvable The public record could not settle it.

Factual: Statements about the present or the past, checked against the record: did they hold up?

What would count as true or false

True: dated evidence shows unauthorized posts or activity on Pinker's X account (@sapinker) on the evening of 2024-06-20, before his statement (e.g. archived anomalous posts, such as crypto scams, later deleted, or news or third-party reports of the hack). Mostly true: the account was compromised, but the timing differs slightly (e.g. the afternoon, or late the previous night). Mixed: unusual posts appeared, but whether they came from a hack is unclear. Mostly false: there was anomalous activity, but the evidence points to something other than a hack (e.g. a mistake by an authorized user). False: evidence shows no compromise occurred, e.g. the disputed posts were authored by Pinker himself.

Set before the research began.

Reasoning

No evidence with a verified quote was found apart from the claim's own source, so the claim was not judged.

Cite this claim

Steven Pinker, “Pinker's X account was hacked earlier on the evening of 2024-06-20.” (said 20 June 2024). Verdict: unresolvable. Reliability API, claim c_bf928973e390, method 0.1.0+28da144b, dataset release v1.1.2. https://epistacklabs.com/claims/c_bf928973e390

This claim is in dataset release v1.1.2, with the same verdict.

Reply to this claim

For Steven Pinker, or someone speaking for them: a correction or counter-evidence. Replies are read before anything is shown; an approved reply shows your name, role, date, statement and link. Your email address is never shown and is deleted 30 days after the decision (privacy).

More factual claims by Steven Pinker

  1. Resolved true Factual 26 September 2026
    “To be sure, my arguments were laid out five years before the release of LLM chatbots, and I would update some of them today.”

    Pinker's arguments on AI risk were laid out five years before the release of LLM chatbots.

  2. Mostly true Factual 2023
    “I’ve got to say that I’m one of the ones who said that’s just not how language works.”

    Pinker was among those who argued that predicting the next word is not how language works.

  3. Resolved true Factual 24 December 2022
    “discovered and edited by me & Harvey Silverglate”

    The lost Carl Sagan lecture 'Science and Civil Liberties' was discovered and edited by Steven Pinker and Harvey Silverglate and appeared in Quillette's 2022 Editors' Choice.

  4. Resolved true Factual 12 March 2020
    “Social and Political Bias: Newest lecture in Gen Ed 1066, Rationality.”

    The newest lecture in Gen Ed 1066, Rationality, is titled Social and Political Bias.

  5. Resolved true Factual 27 December 2019
    “Perhaps recklessly, I took on this assignment from the Financial Times for their end-of-year issue.”

    Pinker took on an assignment from the Financial Times to write about what to expect from the 2020s for its end-of-year issue.

All of them

Verdicts are made automatically; how verdicts are made.