Yes, I meant that GoDaddy and PayPal should apologize.
Twitter should look into what happened in this specific case, and somehow (if the posting is right) return the username to its original owner.
But there does seem to be something terribly broken here if it's possible for someone to get another person's Twitter account, and for it to take a full investigation to get it back to the original owner. And for not having better procedures in place, I think that an apology wouldn't be unreasonable.
In general, it seems to me that demonstrating empathy for your customers is a pretty reasonable strategy. Even if they didn't do anything wrong, and before they have finished this investigation, they can show that they care about the people using their system.
I don't think that Twitter could go wrong by saying, "We now see that we need to make it harder for scammers to switch the ownership of a Twitter account, and are looking into how to do so without hurting our legitimate users."
The Twitter account wasn't actually compromised. The guy was blackmailed to hand it over. It would be pretty nice of Twitter to hand it back, but it's really hard to fault them, and it's especially hard to fault them for not just reassigning the account without a very careful investigation - what if the writer of this article is actually the guy trying to steal the account from someone else, using this article to bully Twitter into a swift response?
It's not about his identity, it's about the legitimacy of his claim to the account.
Just for the record, I have no reason to believe he's saying anything less than the truth - but I can't fault Twitter for basically presuming malice until they have conclusively documented the opposite.
