Hacker News Reader

Comment by CobrastanJorji | Hacker News Reader

That's true. One is the President's principle mechanism of speaking with the American public and firing top officials.

“principal”

If Trump's account got hacked it could quite literally result in the death of millions.

More likely is that some Russian or Chinese hackers would make statements that tank the stock market. While setting up some short positions immediately prior.

The funny part about this is that if we are to believe Trump is a Manchurian candidate, they already did this with the trade war.

I’m just curious how you imagine this happening. @realdonaldtrump tweeting “I HEREBY ORDER...” is not a legally binding order. Launching nuclear missiles or whatever requires authentication codes and can only be ordered via a portable radio alongside a series of codebooks, all of which is carried by a military aide who is always near the President. Another country isn’t going to start a war based on some weird tweets. It’s an extremely unlikely and weird risk.

A well crafted message that inflames followers to riot...

I'm the kind of person who, for example, doubted the Covington Kids story from the beginning. By which I mean I'm not particularly alarmist about a putative vast right-wing catastrophe taking place. But any popular leader (and he's very popular among the people he's popular with) can start incidents like that by accident.

You mean like accusing people of treason? (punishable by death) He’s already done that from his account. To my knowledge Comey hasn’t been lynched.

This is true. Trump is so loud the whole time that it's hard to take him very seriously, even for his supporters.

Ok but what “riot” in human history has killed MILLIONS of people? The Rwandan genocide was pretty close, except the groundwork for inciting it was laid over the course of months via state radio and they imported machetes into the country before the message was sent to “cut down the tall trees”. A compromised Twitter account isn’t going to do it.

His tweets regularly have material impact on the markets.

But how would that kill millions of people? There’s a super indirect chain of events there.

Imagine triggering a global depression.

Imagine what effect that would have on already-pressured populations across the globe.

If North Korea did have a means of delivering nukes with ICBMs, and this previous type of thing: https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/94835555702242099...

had escalated more, I don't think it's too far-fetched to imagine an unstable dictator sending off a nuke after being goaded on twitter.

I think it's within the realms of possibility at the very least, although very unlikely (mostly because NK hasn't got a decent delivery system, their nukes aren't very advanced/portable yet and Kim Jong Un's probably not too keen for NK to be destroyed in retaliation).

Given Trump's recent tweet of the spy satellite image, and the apparent taunting of Iran, it's also possible that type of thing could be responsible for triggering future terrorist attacks (although obviously that's not millions of people).

Terrorists and rogue dictators are often described as "unstable" or "irrational", but they tend to be rational within certain boundaries. For example, if you actually believe the nonsense about an afterlife filled with dozens of virgin concubines, suicide bombing becomes a rational decision, aside from being motivated by an irrational belief. Likewise, Kim's strategy follows the basic form of hostage-taking. If Kim actually "sent off a nuke", he would lose much of his leverage, just as a hostage taker loses leverage as soon as he starts killing hostages.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com