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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 somethin

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? Equity destruction: sure. War: no way.

kleiba 6y ago
Donald Trump?
- dmitryminkovsky 6y ago
  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.
  - zestyping 6y ago
    Of course he can. He ordered the assassination of Soleimani in Iraq that could very well have led to a war. Wars are the result of a series of escalations. It doesn't take a lot to knock over the first domino.
    - dmitryminkovsky 6y ago
      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.
  - computerex 6y ago
    The president has the power to deploy the armed forces abroad without the approval of congress for a period of time.
    - dmitryminkovsky 6y ago
      That's on paper. 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.
      - computerex 6y ago
        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.
  - NateEag 6y ago
    A US president has the power to unilaterally launch the nuclear arsenal: https://allthingsnuclear.org/dwright/trump-and-the-nuclear-codes-how-to-launch-a-nuclear-weapon 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.
    - dmitryminkovsky 6y ago
      > 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.
      - NateEag 6y ago
        I hope Trump wouldn't actually be able to nuke anyone while throwing a fit, and I think it's unlikely that he could. It is important to remember how the US launch system actually works, though, and that it's theoretically possible he could.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- raxxorrax 6y ago
  He is one of the more peaceful presidents. 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.
  - midasz 6y ago
    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.
  - thinkingemote 6y ago
    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.
    - dmitryminkovsky 6y ago
      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.
kryogen1c 6y ago
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 : )
- dmitryminkovsky 6y ago
  “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.
  - kryogen1c 6y ago
    > but come on 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%
    - dmitryminkovsky 6y ago
      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?
blisseyGo 6y ago
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.
- dmitryminkovsky 6y ago
  Blackmail yes, totally possible. I’m specifically addressing war though.
  - cbzoiav 6y ago
    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. Its highly unlikely but far from impossible.
zestyping 6y ago
War seems very possible. 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.
- crispyambulance 6y ago
  > War seems very possible. No. While there may be a "last straw" event that precipitates the war, it take a lot of build up to lead to it. A salty remark on twitter that is rapidly taken-back?? I don't think so.
  - 6510 6y ago
    Just tell the truth, there is no way to rollback.
    - crispyambulance 6y ago
      The platform may not allow a "rollback" but for the kinds of things we're considering there are multiple channels of communication.
lifeformed 6y ago
Here's how I think it could be done: 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).
- lostsock 6y ago
  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.
  - puranjay 6y ago
    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.
    - peroporque 6y ago
      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.
- mongol 6y ago
  If this indeed had happened, I wonder how it would have played out. It would not be pretty, that is for sure.
grugagag 6y ago
A war of tweets maybe. If this hack could start a war then any state actor could manipulate us into war. Let’s not speculate war here. We’re on HN:)
rapnie 6y ago
How about civil war, or at least large-scale riots?
- dmitryminkovsky 6y ago
  Riots or mass hysteria I can imagine coming from a hack like this.
lazysheepherd 6y ago
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.
- brabel 6y ago
  > 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).
- Sebb767 6y ago
  > 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.
silasdavis 6y ago
It depends how close to war the belligerents are before such tweets. Could a Trump tweet (real or fake) cause a pivotal escalation in a series or escalations leading to war? I think probably yes.
- peroporque 6y ago
  No, that's not how international relations work. Really not. May be different for internal politics. Since people are often irrational.

kleiba 6y ago

Donald Trump?

dmitryminkovsky 6y ago
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.
- zestyping 6y ago
  Of course he can. He ordered the assassination of Soleimani in Iraq that could very well have led to a war. Wars are the result of a series of escalations. It doesn't take a lot to knock over the first domino.
  - dmitryminkovsky 6y ago
    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.
- computerex 6y ago
  The president has the power to deploy the armed forces abroad without the approval of congress for a period of time.
  - dmitryminkovsky 6y ago
    That's on paper. 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.
    - computerex 6y ago
      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.
- NateEag 6y ago
  A US president has the power to unilaterally launch the nuclear arsenal: https://allthingsnuclear.org/dwright/trump-and-the-nuclear-codes-how-to-launch-a-nuclear-weapon 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.
  - dmitryminkovsky 6y ago
    > 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.
    - NateEag 6y ago
      I hope Trump wouldn't actually be able to nuke anyone while throwing a fit, and I think it's unlikely that he could. It is important to remember how the US launch system actually works, though, and that it's theoretically possible he could.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
raxxorrax 6y ago
He is one of the more peaceful presidents. 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.
- midasz 6y ago
  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.
- thinkingemote 6y ago
  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.
  - dmitryminkovsky 6y ago
    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.

kryogen1c 6y ago

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 : )

dmitryminkovsky 6y ago
“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.
- kryogen1c 6y ago
  > but come on 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%
  - dmitryminkovsky 6y ago
    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?

blisseyGo 6y ago

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.

dmitryminkovsky 6y ago
Blackmail yes, totally possible. I’m specifically addressing war though.
- cbzoiav 6y ago
  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. Its highly unlikely but far from impossible.

zestyping 6y ago

War seems very possible. 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.

crispyambulance 6y ago
> War seems very possible. No. While there may be a "last straw" event that precipitates the war, it take a lot of build up to lead to it. A salty remark on twitter that is rapidly taken-back?? I don't think so.
- 6510 6y ago
  Just tell the truth, there is no way to rollback.
  - crispyambulance 6y ago
    The platform may not allow a "rollback" but for the kinds of things we're considering there are multiple channels of communication.

lifeformed 6y ago

Here's how I think it could be done: 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).

lostsock 6y ago
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.
- puranjay 6y ago
  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.
  - peroporque 6y ago
    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.
mongol 6y ago
If this indeed had happened, I wonder how it would have played out. It would not be pretty, that is for sure.

grugagag 6y ago

A war of tweets maybe. If this hack could start a war then any state actor could manipulate us into war. Let’s not speculate war here. We’re on HN:)

rapnie 6y ago

How about civil war, or at least large-scale riots?

dmitryminkovsky 6y ago
Riots or mass hysteria I can imagine coming from a hack like this.

lazysheepherd 6y ago

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.

brabel 6y ago
> 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).
Sebb767 6y ago
> 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.

silasdavis 6y ago

It depends how close to war the belligerents are before such tweets. Could a Trump tweet (real or fake) cause a pivotal escalation in a series or escalations leading to war? I think probably yes.

peroporque 6y ago
No, that's not how international relations work. Really not. May be different for internal politics. Since people are often irrational.