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Comment by datavirtue | Hacker News Reader

It's Twitter. What possible serious security implications could possibly warrant everyone in Washington getting into a frenzy?

All you do is make public comments that have zero value.

And if this is indeed serious, where the fuck have we landed?

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A well-timed set of tweets from compromised government and private-sector accounts, coordinated with real stock market activity planned by the attacker such that investors cannot ignore the rumors, could cause a geopolitically significant market panic. This already happened in 2013, and that was with just a single account being compromised: https://business.time.com/2013/04/24/how-does-one-fake-tweet...

In the long run that would be a good thing. It would be an object lesson that investors shouldn't believe anything they read on social media.

Investors always have the option to ignore rumors.

But investors also need to be quick to react if they want to make (serious) money. Ignoring a tweet from a verified account about a disastrous event is not reasonable at all in 99.9% of cases.

What I'm trying to say is, you might be able to discredit Twitter, but you won't fix investors trying to invest ahead of the news.

Bullshit. By many measures Warren Buffett is the most successful investor of our time. He is famous for being slow to react, and he has made some serious money. So I think you don't understand investing.

And if some investors lose money then so what? That is an acceptable outcome. Let them suffer, I have zero sympathy.

OK, Twitter needs regulated then. Hardly a private going concern if you are right.

This won't fix the fragility of our economy. It would start a weird exit model for social platforms, though. Get big enough that the US buys you out.

Our economy is not fragile.

The last US President used Twitter as his primary way to communicate with the world. That on its own has serious security implications.

I agree with you that we have landed in not a great place.

I hope we get to a place where we all agree that a sitting U.S. President should not "tweet." The White House maintains a Press Secretary for a reason. Granted, the current person holding the job is no C.J. Craig.

I don't agree. The US president (and other politicians) should have a convenient way to communicate directly with the public, without the message being distorted by media organizations. Ideally though it should be a service that can't be censored; Twitter frequently censors users based on the arbitrary whims of their employees.

Like traditional secretaries, the WH Press Secretary may have become obsolete.

Both Psaki and Jean-Pierre have been excellent press secretaries. C.J. Craig is a fictional character written to be superhumanly prescient and witty in response to fictional crises.

> The last US President used Twitter as his primary way to communicate with the world.

Without it sounding like an endorsement or defense of the guy… I never would have believed without seeing it, just how furious this made the media and other politicians. That you have a guy come in who said forget the system, I’m going talk to the people directly (and say some dumb things now and then).

I still attest that some of the Trump hate is solely because groups of people that control the narrative in the US were excluded from creation and forced to be on narrative-adjustment.

Agreed, this isn’t a good place. One platform should not have this level of influence.

It wasn't the platform. As you can see, it took some time, but Trump found a way to do the same without Twitter. Despite all the efforts of Big Tech to control the access to public discussion, they still can't make it airtight, and contain somebody of Trump's caliber. Arguably, they have more luck with people of the smaller caliber though. And that's definitely not a good place. It's not about the specific guy, it's about how eager the Big Social turned out to be to control what we think and what we are allowed to talk about.

>> It's Twitter. What possible serious security implications could possibly warrant everyone in Washington getting into a frenzy?

Considering how widely used Twitter is, at this point we can comfortably assume that most politicians and political operatives, even high profile ones, must have very sensitive information in their Twitter DM inboxes.

Whew, I would assume no one is using Twitter DMs. If they are, these should be 100% personal and unimportant. If not, those people should be investigated, not Twitter.

I'm not defending Twitter, I don't engage with it at all.

> must have very sensitive information in their Twitter DM inboxes.

I doubt that, and if they really do, they should be either trained or exposed pronto. Twitter is an entertainment platform.

You've described the way it ostensibly should be.

My guess is that the reality is almost perfectly in opposition to what you've described. Anything that introduces plausible deniability is going to be of a major benefit.

ah ah ah so they trust twitter ? the situation is improving at minus light speed...

I won't be surprised that they do. Most politicians are very thoroughly technically ignorant, and have little time or patience to spend on learning technically complex things, and really safe communication means aren't usually very user-friendly.

I’d also add the opportunity for provocateurs to cause problems: e.g. inducing vaccine hesitancy (back when the covid vaccines worked, but let’s not focus too much on that).

My feed is still filled with how all of our public service problems must be caused by the 1-2% that were put on unpaid leave for refusing to disclose their vaccination status. I’m sure the 1-2% could help, but the issues are much larger than that.

I can think of a few accounts that, with a single tweet, could move markets, inflame tensions, or kick off multiple cycles of misinformation. For many of these large, influential accounts, Twitter is effectively the same as an official press release.

Considering a journalist was murdered and dismembered due to their lax security not to long ago, I would consider it definitely worth looking into.

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