People keep saying it could have started a war. Excuse me for being naive but come on—really? This is total sensationalism. What party wouldn’t verify something on twitter through diplomatic channels before going to war?
Wars start from smaller conflicts, which come about through escalation of smaller conflicts, lies, or misunderstandings. I think all that is necessary to start a war is a geopolitical event of sufficient severity to provoke a retaliation; once the first retaliation happens, there is high risk of further escalation.
So the question is whether a deception on Twitter could trigger a real-world event significant enough to provoke a retaliation. It might be hard to do that with a single message, but they had access to multiple accounts. These tweets were stupidly obvious scams. You could create a huge amount of panic with a series of posts from different influential accounts if they were designed to be believable.
Exactly! Nothing major could have come out of this.
If you disagree, please let me try to convince you;
Tweets were about bitcoin, therefore broad public was not the target of the attack.
Hence Twitter just prevented verified accounts from posting and deleted some messages. Had president's account been hijacked and threats of imminent nuclear strike etc. were thrown around, DoD would have been quick to contact to Twitter and they would have been disabled the whole account, put notifications about hijack for everyone to see (like these COVID notifications) or maybe even take the whole platform offline until they fix it.
You would click a link to go to the said tweet, but you'd only see president's account is not there, and there's a huge warning saying it has been hijacked, and devs are working to get it back. That's it.
Now please try to convince me otherwise, I'd love to be challenged on this.
> Tweets were about bitcoin, therefore broad public was not the target of the attack.
No. Bitcoin was used because it's the only way to get money without being tracked (hence why drug dealers and even hitmen use it).
The rest of your argument is all speculation. Nobody knows what would've happened, so you can't convince anyone you're right, just like no one can convince you you're wrong.
I will just say that with the current distrust of Russia/China and in recent years, the US becoming an "unreliable" ally for Europe, a few tweets from a President and perhaps some other senior members of Government could easily have started a disastrous series of events (if unlikely to cause war directly).
> and they would have been disabled the whole account, put notifications about hijack for everyone to see (like these COVID notifications) or maybe even take the whole platform offline until they fix it.
This hack had been going on for over two hours, with new high-stakes accounts being steadily taken over (and possibly have their DMs siphoned) and their only action was to disable posting for verified accounts. I think we can safely say that IF Twitter had the possibility to effectively pull the plug, we would've seen that on Wednesday.
This hack simply proved that a lot bigger things are possible. They could have (maybe they did) read private messages which could simply be used for blackmail. A top defense official getting blackmailed is pretty easy step to escalation to broken diplomacy.
A top defence official or the president private messaging someone could contain information able to break diplomatic relations. Obtaining information required to blackmail one could trigger a minor incident which escalates.
Get Trump's account, and tweet something like, "I've ordered a NUCLEAR STRIKE on China! The missiles are already in the air. The DEEP STATE is trying to take me out. They will try to silence me and delete these tweets and use deep fakes to say this was a hoax! The storm is here, Q is real, it's time to take up arms and kill democrats."
Then continue tweeting escalating things over the next half hour (since apparently the hackers couldn't be stopped for a while).
Not to mention hijacking other accounts that would plausibly say things along the same lines as "proof" that the statement is real.
Even after dozens of high profile accounts were hacked many were still commenting that they didn't think it was possible for it to be a twitter vulnerability, but rather individual accounts being compromised or a 3rd party. If you only tweeted plausible things about war and corroborated it from multiple accounts at the same time you can reinforce things pretty easily.
Considering that they got Obama's account as well, you could very well create a narrative and counter narrative using the POTUS and ex-POTUS accounts. For the sake of fiction, you could have Obama tweet that he is, indeed, taking over, and arresting Trump. Maybe not war, but it could exacerbate the lack of trust across political divides.
What could be dangerous about it is that CNNFOX et al would copy-paste the story without fact checking, inflate it, and make as much money from it as they can.
In SF author Neal Stephenson's latest book, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell there is a hoax to convince people that Moab, Utah has been destroyed by a nuclear weapon. A cyberattack takes the city's communications offline, paid actors describe seeing the flash and mushroom cloud from passenger planes, etc.
Twenty years later, a substantial part of American society is still insisting Moab really was nuked, drives around with "Remember Moab" bumper stickers, and considers the purported continued existence of Moab to be something like a Deep State plot.
>By August 14, the recording of Reagan's joke had become world news. On August 15, someone who the National Security Agency described to US Representative Michael D. Barnes as "a wayward operator in the Soviet Far Eastern command" sent a coded message from Vladivostok that said, in part, "We now embark on military action against the U.S. forces." Japanese and US intelligence decoded the message and raised the alert state in that part of the world; Soviet naval vessels in the North Pacific, on the other hand, contacted Vladivostok in confusion. The US never saw any evidence of Soviet attack preparations, and the alert status as promulgated by Vladivostok was canceled within 30 minutes.[3]
>Initially, on August 13, the deputy minister of Soviet foreign affairs (Valentin Kamenev) told reporters, "I have nothing to say."[5] By the next day, though, President Reagan's leaked comments were denounced by the Soviet government, Pravda, Izvestia, and TASS as "unprecedentedly hostile," as evidence of the United States' insincerity at trying to improve Soviet Union–United States relations, and as abuse of the office of the president. "Western diplomats" described the Soviet response as over-the-top, suggesting it was an effort to give themselves more collateral at the negotiating table with the US.[7] US officials were compelled to mollify the Soviet Union and assure the United States' Cold War adversary that "Reagan’s offhand remark did not reflect White House policies or U.S. military intentions."[8]
As dumb as Reagan was it was so out of character for him to say that that people clued in to it being a joke. In Trump's case it is not so far out that it might be believed.
Conspiracy nuts don't need much to set them off, see 'pizzagate'.
And then you need to people to read that nonsense. You need a Twitter account to be able to read that.
Only few people have Twitter accounts, it's a walled garden. Almost nobody cares what people shout in 140 chars, and likewise nobody cares about people streaming video on Twitch or YouTube in 20 min, what could be written publicly and read in 10 seconds.
Well let’s see...since all countries with ICBMs also have technology in place to detect or verify via satellite a nuclear launch, absolutely nothing would happen. If a real launch had taken place, they would have known about it far before they heard about a post on Twitter. The alarmism here on HN is really disappointing. This is the kind of foolishness usually reserved for Reddit.
The intended audience of such tweets wouldn’t be Russia or China, it would be the conspiracy-minded wingnuts who might take that as their sign. Who knows what they might try. At the very least it would fuel further social division.
With tensions already high and military maneuvers are beeing held closes to each other ... such a twitter comment for sure would have had an effect.
No one would have pushed any red button because of that, but fighter jets on both sides would have been put on alarm and in the air and close to each other(as well as submarines, warships, tanks on the border..) , with a high chance of clashes. Which could have increased the escalation to the point, that someone would feel forced to put the red button.
I think brainstorming about combinations of variables that could plausibly lead to a black swan event is worthwhile, and an excellent application for the collective mental processing powers of HN. I would advocate for a new kind of discussion class for threads, to focus on discrete perspectives and goals, risk being one of the most important kinds. Smart casual conversation is excellent, but there are other types that are also excellent, but in a different way.
I think plenty could have happened. Compare with the false nuclear attack alarm in Hawaii the other year. Panic can cause all kinds of unforseeable consequences.
Right, but I think the point is that panic is the only real danger this hack could've caused. That's important in it's own right, but hacking twitter is not going to cause nuclear war. DoD has a ... tentative relationship with social media. They are not making strategic deployment decisions based off of tweets (thank God).
> since all countries with ICBMs also have technology in place to detect or verify via satellite a nuclear launch
It's lucky that those kinds of things never go wron...
"On 26 September 1983, the nuclear early-warning system of the Soviet Union reported the launch of multiple intercontinental ballistic missiles from bases in the United States."
Indeed! Where do people think USD 2tn/year for global military go? Weapons, yes, but also military intelligence, missile detecting and defense systems, radars, sonars, spy satellites, communication efficiency and disaster prevention.
Military is not _exactly_ ran-out-of-diazepam Dave with his hunting rifle and tinfoil hat.
Nothing would happend from this. China and other might raise their alarm, but nobody would raise their own weapons without proof for something really happning outside of twitter.
In the meanwhile Trump would appear after some minutes on TV, youtube, and whatever other channel they have around, proofing that he is not sending the tweets, while twitter would do their stuff.
You are an optimist. We only need one mistake for things to get out of control. The history of known close calls is eye opening[1]. Similarly with this particular China example, it only takes one person to make a miscalculation.
I'm a realist. This list proofes that people are not as stupid as alarmists make them. At the end of the line, there are always people asking the relevant questions, because it's their f*ing job to do that.
War is perhaps an exaggeration, but if its wrong its wrong quantitatively, not qualitatively. In other words, lives unquestionably hung in the balance.
I dont even have a twitter, facebook, instagram, or... anything i think. just you people : )
“Unquestionably” you’ve got to at least give an example. How did lives hang in the balance? I’m not saying the likelihood is 0, it’s best not to be irresponsible like this obviously, but come on, it’s not even 0.5.
i will not. affected persons included biden, kanye, obama, musk, bezos, gates and others. this is an audience in the 100's of millions (if not over a billion, i didnt count). do you honestly think theres no possible tweet that directly leads to someone's death, and likely many deaths?
im not sure an outright war is > 50% possible, but i am sure it is > 0.0%
A war from hacked Tweets? What would these tweets say? “Premier Xi’s wife is ugly?” I mean Trump already tweets totally insane things regularly. “Rocket man” etc. what could joe Biden, bill gates or anyone possibly say on Twitter to start a war or even lead to some such mass death incident. Even “irresponsible” state actors like Iran would use intelligence channels to confirm things. Even the taliban doesn’t actually act irrationally. Maybe we need to agree to disagree here?
This is ridiculous, there is ample room for criticism against Trump. This wouldn't fit at all. I guess you can blame him on Turkeys reaction in Syria, his staunch anti-Iranian policies that made talks more difficult. But the criticism of him starting random wars comes from an emotional corner beyond reality in my opinion.
He's just seen (at least by the ROTW) as very unstable and prone to lashing out. He might not order a war but his inability to govern with rationality and diplomacy does give credence to the side effect of relations worsening to the point of armed conflict.
It's ironic that our kids in the future reading wikipedia there will be a table of numbers killed overseas by US presidents. Trump will be listed as one of the most peaceful in that table.
It's ironic because his image today is of violence and instability and that the opponents of him don't consider violence overseas or international peace as that important.
It's things happening at home which counts politically in a present time.
Trump will kill less than Obama but Obama gets the noble peace prize.
I looked it up and from what I could tell, drone strkes are actually up under Trump. I thought they were down, but looks like they just not being reported as much.
A president can’t just “start a war”, muchless order air strikes. dozens of people are involved. Donald Trump yells and hollers all the time and people send Jared to calm him down. There have already been documented instances of this in the Trump admin, and it wasn’t over tweets.
Whether the military would actually carry out those orders when no one else has ICBMs in the air is debatable, but the president's defined role as the commander-in-chief and the sole arbiter of when to open the gates of hell on earth is not.
> Whether the military would actually carry out those orders when no one else has ICBMs in the air is debatable
It's not merely debatable, it's highly debatable. People aren't just going to launch nuclear weapons willy nilly, no matter who the president is, muchless for Donald J. Trump, who few people in his administration take seriously.
Trump couldn't even get Mark Esper to deploy troops domestically. Now imagine the hurdles he'd face trying to deploy troops to another country.
He ordered it, and it was executed methodically with over a year of preparation. Everyone was on board, or at least enough people were convinced.
On the contrary, take what happened when Trump wanted to bomb Syria, and people basically didn't let him. Presidents, especially weak, un-respected ones like Trump, can't just do things like that.
Then there's reality. And in reality, not many people respect Trump and are willing to follow his orders. This happens constantly in the news. His own cabinet members openly work against him all the time.
Most recently consider how Mark Esper publically publicly rejected using the Insurrection Act, right over top of Trump.
Now you could say—what if we had some other president? Well, the same social rules would apply to that person as well. Even if they were incredibly charismatic and well-liked and respected, they'd need to clear many social and political hurdles before the airplanes took off.
The president is the commander in chief. In the armed forces following the chain of command is kind of a big deal and there are severe consequences for ignoring a direct moral order from a higher ranked officer.
Equity destruction: sure. War: no way.