Future Tense

BlackBerry Spokeswoman Alicia Keys Blames iPhone Tweet on Drake-Obsessed Hacker

BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins introduces the company's new global creative director, who would never dream of tweeting from an iPhone but sometimes gets hacked by a Drake-obsessed iPhone tweeter.

BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins introduces the company’s new global creative director, who would never dream of tweeting from an iPhone but sometimes gets hacked by a Drake-obsessed iPhone tweeter.

Photo by Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images

When BlackBerry introduced R&B singer Alicia Keys as its new “global creative director” last month, I was a tad skeptical. In my admittedly limited experience, companies that are not utterly desperate tend to hire creative directors who are actual employees, if they hire creative directors at all.

My misgivings appeared founded early on. At a launch event for the widely anticipated BlackBerry 10 operating system, Keys delivered a meandering monologue in which she assured the audience that while she had once broken up with her BlackBerry in favor of “hotter, sexier phones” with “more bling,” she and her old smartphone flame were back to “exclusively dating.” The New York Times’ Brian X. Chen was quick to point out that Keys had been spotted tweeting from her iPhone just a few days earlier, an unfortunate coincidence that called to mind Oprah Winfrey’s tweet last year plugging the Microsoft Surface from her iPad.

On Monday, the intrigue deepened as the gadget blog Pocket-Lint spotted Keys apparently dallying with her ex once again. “Started from the bottom now were here!” the BlackBerry global creative director seemed to have tweeted from the iPhone’s Twitter app, quoting the rapper Drake. The blog even had photographic evidence: a picture of Keys in her dressing room for the Grammys showed not one but two iPhones within arm’s reach.

Thankfully, Keys quickly came out Monday afternoon with a tweet that revealed the whole episode to have been a misunderstanding. It wasn’t Keys who tweeted those Drake lyrics from an iPhone. I mean, she likes Drake, but not that much. No, the real culprit was… a hacker. A Drake-obsessed hacker. A Drake-obsessed hacker who hacked Keys’ Twitter account from an iPhone solely for the purpose of making Keys’ followers think that she likes Drake more than she actually does.

Thank goodness she cleared that up. Let’s just hope the hacker has learned his or her lesson and won’t be causing BlackBerry any further embarrassment in the future.