The King's Twitter account hacked by a journalist

The message was quickly removed. The Royal Palace informed the press that it didn't know where it came from. Today, the commercial TV station VTM reports that it was the Dutch journalist Rick Evers who was responsible for the tweet.

The man was the original owner of the account, but donated it to the Belgian royal family without asking money for it. The Royal Palace changed the passwords, but as the account had been created by the Dutch journalist, he still had access to it. "Technically speaking, I could still post tweets or remove them", he told VTM.

The man explained that his aim was to show that official instances have to be careful with social media, and that they should take stricter measures to protect their accounts.

The Royal Palace said in a statement that the journalist did not keep an earlier promise. "When giving up the account, he promised that he would make sure he had no longer access." However, it's not all bad news for King Filip: the commotion caused by the Twitter incident was free publicity, which earned him 900 extra followers.