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.
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).