Equity destruction: sure. War: no way.
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.
> War seems very possible.
A salty remark on twitter that is rapidly taken-back?? I don't think so.
Let’s not speculate war here. We’re on HN:)
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.
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).
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.
Its highly unlikely but far from impossible.
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).
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.
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.
> My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.
>Reactions
>Soviet
>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]
http://www.msnbc.com/transcripts/rachel-maddow-show/2016-12-...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/14/ronald-reagan-...
https://www.politico.com/story/2010/08/reagan-jokes-about-bo...
Audio and news coverage:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFCABnWlN8E
Bonzo Goes To Washington - B-B-B Bombing In 5 Minutes (Jerry Harrison, Bootsy Collins)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0k4TNtUZnM4
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Minutes_(Bonzo_Goes_to_Wa...
Conspiracy nuts don't need much to set them off, see 'pizzagate'.
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.
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.
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."
...oh.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...
Military is not _exactly_ ran-out-of-diazepam Dave with his hunting rifle and tinfoil hat.
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.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_close_calls
>Get Trump's account...
Tweets from Stable Genius are now just grist for a media-industrial complex of outrage.
I dont even have a twitter, facebook, instagram, or... anything i think. just you people : )
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%
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.
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.
https://allthingsnuclear.org/dwright/trump-and-the-nuclear-c...
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.
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.
It is important to remember how the US launch system actually works, though, and that it's theoretically possible he could.
Wars are the result of a series of escalations. It doesn't take a lot to knock over the first domino.
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.
Could a Trump tweet (real or fake) cause a pivotal escalation in a series or escalations leading to war? I think probably yes.
May be different for internal politics. Since people are often irrational.