This looks like another "Twitter was hacked" articles... There's virtually nothing about the article about national security... Disappointing.
Here's a national security concern: a president announced he's going to war. Or a military tweets they've lost control of their nukes... Or reports a widespread network communication fault and advises all personal to communicate through a specific channel (which might degrade security)
If you were hoping for national security concerns, don't bother reading the article.
If the hacker used Trump's account to call for an immediate call to arms and to attack <enter group here>, enough people could have done something to trigger a civil war.
Perhaps the right tweet might do it. Trump has incited violence, explicitly and in subtext, before. So it's not a matter of a simple call-to-arms, like in the past, but then I'm not sure what would be the tipping point.
Predicting the future is fraught with peril. It seems likely that Trump will not win a reelection this November, and seems closer than ever that we will have a peaceful transition of power at that time, versus where we were a year or two ago. Historically civil wars happen when the government hasn't had a change of power in a long time, and not in situations where it cycles over regularly.
Right - but the question asked was not "Are we going to have a Civil War?" it was "Are we one tweet away?" which I interpret as "Could one tweet conceivably start a Civil War?"
Trump blindsiding officials with mandates via unplanned//unknown public Twitter announcement isn't something new.
While it'd likely get resolved before things went nuclear, you could probably do some major damage while people scramble into action before communication channels get straightened out and verify things.
Contrary to public opinion, Twitter is not the center of the known universe. Democrats and BLM activists routinely post things like that (death threats, "kill wheety", "republicans must burn", etc), and despite many left wing radicals actually committing acts of violence, little wide spread action has come of it.
A hack to Trump's account might cause a little havoc, but as the vast majority of Americans do not use Twitter, and get their news elsewhere, I doubt it would cause much harm beyond what we already see on a daily basis. The White House and other real news outlets would just issue statements publicizing the hack and that would be the end of it.
`And that makes you wonder what contingencies the company has put into place in the event that it is someday taken over not by greedy Bitcoin con artists, but state-level actors or psychopaths. After today it is no longer unthinkable, if it ever truly was, that someone take over the account of a world leader and attempt to start a nuclear war.`
It's pretty disingenuous if you read the article and still says there's nothing there and then repeat the same thing the article wrote.
I think you quoted the entirety of the article that addresses national security...
The other 95% of the article was recap of what every article says about the incident, or otherwise not related to national security...
I was excited to read any possible national security implications, perhaps things I wasn't even thinking of... And I was disappointed that the 2 sentences you posted, buried in the tail of a rather long article, were the justification for the headline "profound national security implications"...
I at least hypothesized potential national security risks, instead of making vague national security claims... The article is using those 2-3 sentences to give a scarier headline to drive clicks, when it's not much better than the other stories already on here.
I wonder why they didn't target Donald Trump's account. My guess is that there's some accounts hidden behind a different structure that is only accesible to a handful of people.
Or maybe they just didn't want to shake the hornet's nest.
In 2017 a Twitter employee already got fired for momentarily deleting his account.
After that incident I doubt the regular employee admin panel has access to it. Probably a few accounts require special admin privileges (world leader accounts I assume).
Which would be a much more reasonable explanation than the conspiracies being floated and could also imply that Twitter has thought about the "national security" scenarios in the article.
> You shouldn't be able to get away with something like that
An account on a private service was deleted. Not a brilliant move. But not something that merits more than being fired and possibly pursued for money damages.
Has any information about an audit come out. It seems like his account should have been the number one target to suck in all the drafts and DMs and posting a trash bitcoin scam on other prominent accounts seems like a great way to distract from their goal.
His base would believe the most ridiculous things as long as they are coming from his mouth. So I wouldn’t be surprised that could work. But I don’t think his hardcore base understands what Bitcoin is, so probably wouldn’t work.
This incident brings to mind the time in 2017 when President Trump sent out three tweets, the first one starting with "After consultation with my Generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States Government will not accept..." and then a 9 minute gap before the second one, leaving the people around the world speculating. Did the president just start a war on Twitter? No, he had asked the military to enact a transgender ban.
Jesus Christ, everything is a matter of "national security" nowadays. Celebrities' favorite shitposting platform is not a critical piece of infrastructure or a real tool for soft power.
You might be right (or at least closer to it) if the current POTUS didn't regularly use Twitter to make actual policy pronouncements with significant real-world consequences.
Copying a quote I shared in a previous discussion about the hack's implications:
"Justice Department lawyer Jennifer Utrecht in her reply [in a Supreme Court case] acknowledged the president’s tweets are official government statements"
A statement and a proclaimation are distinct. A proclaimation implies that it's an announcement meant to be widely seen. In truth I don't think even Trump's supporters pay attention to his Twitter.
You're grossly exaggerating. Trump's also used Twitter to float potential policy changes that either weren't implemented or were considerably changed before implementation.
Trump used Twitter to threaten thinly veiled war with North Korea in response to North Korean missile tests, and yet a few months later he was shaking hands with Kim Jong Un.
In some ways, Trump's use of Twitter to A/B test would lessen the impact should a hacker gain access to the account, since most people would probably just dismiss it as "Trump being Trump".
Anyone treating Twitter as a gospel truth is an idiot.
I actually think it's a positive thing that the media system is being shaken. Society puts way too much trust in shit that is posted on twitter.
I feel the same way about cancel culture on twitter -- it is bad in the short term, but if it incentivizes people like Yann Lecunn to leave it -- it reduces the importance of the medium itself.
how is it bad that a rich white & powerful ML engineer left twitter because he is trying to defend a racist systemic problem. just improves twitter in my opinion.
can you explain what research you have done in the racism in tech space?
edit: i mean this in good faith since that question is an incredibly complicated one involving power dynamics and systemic issues that can't be boiled down to a simplistic answer. why the downvotes?
No explanation necessary. It's the same old racism, but with a new 2020 twist: it's ok as long as it's racism against people we don't like.
Check out the recent spate of black athletes and celebrities posting openly anti-Semitic comments on social media (one directly (mis)quoting Hitler re: Jews) with zero repercussions.
Zero repercussions? Nick Cannon lost his job and board position, and rightfully so [0]. Do not misconstrue the consequences - people will be fired or blacklisted for these anti-Semitic comments, and that's frankly a good thing.
How about Ice Cube, Stephen Jackson, DeSean Jackson, Dwyane Wade, etc. and all those who supported the comments or brushed them off as "speaking their truth" or some other nonsense? They will face no consequences, because, again, racism is deemed okay in the current climate as long as it's aimed correctly.
Can you even _imagine_ the absolute chaos that would rein if a white NBA player started quoting David Duke to millions of followers, and a bunch of white NBA players and commentators supported them?
> Can you even _imagine_ the absolute chaos that would rein if...
I think everyone has their own media diet, influenced partly by their own choices and partly by algorithms. Your media diet likely has a huge effect on whose reactions you see and thus which reactions you perceive to be "brushing something off" or "absolute chaos."
Even within Twitter there will be a vast difference. If a liberal quotes a conservative tweet in disapproval you will see replies from liberals also expressing disapproval. But if another conservative quotes the same tweet in approval, you’ll see a bunch of conservatives replying in approval. It would be incorrect to conclude either “everyone realized that tweet was terrible” and “everyone agreed with that tweet.”
It’s amusing that Cannon got fired for anti-semitism, which he wasn’t actually guilty of, and not racism for saying white people are less, and are closer to animals.
His full quote for people to judge for themselves:
>“When you have a person that has the lack of pigment, the lack of melanin, they know that they will be annihilated,” Mr. Cannon said during the June podcast. “So therefore, however they got the power, they have the lack of compassion — melanin comes with compassion, melanin comes with soul. We call it soul — we’re soul brothers and sisters — that’s the melanin that connects us, so the people that don’t have [melanin] are a little, and I’m going to say this carefully, are a little less.”
>“They’re acting out of fear, they’re acting out of low self-esteem, they’re acting out of a deficiency,” he continued. “So therefore, the only way that they can act is evil. They have to rob, steal, rape, kill in order to survive. So then, these people who didn’t have what we have — and when I say we, I speak of the melanated people — they had to be savages. They had to be barbaric because they’re in these Nordic mountains. They’re in these rough environments. They’re acting as animals, so they’re the ones that are actually closer to animals. They’re the ones that are actually the true savages.”
Thanks. Yes, again, he did NOT get fired for this.
But he started talking about conspiracy theories relating to the illuminati and the Rothschilds (who, yes, happen to be jewish) and how they have all the power. Nothing derogatory or about jewish people in general that I saw.
Every single headline on my news page says he was anti-semetic and completely ignored the blatant racism. What fun times we are in.
i have no idea what you are talking about. folks are being held accountable, you said they weren't. are you saying that it's not happening fast enough for your liking? you were straight up wrong.
@dang: could you please borrow some fucking decency and stop whiny white supremacists from shitting all over this site?
The above is absolute horseshit which was posted here because the poster knew, with certainty, that they'd face no consequences for posting straight up false information meant to inflame race war.
Flip the script. Ban the lying race-war loving white supremacists.
Because power dynamics play a huge role when we're talking about systemic issues, and the current system gives most favorable outcomes to white males. It's not that the other cases are not important, but dealing with them deserves less priority unless and until they structurally hold that power and receive the benefits.
There are 2 parts here: (1) problem, and (2) remedy.
The issue for myself and likeminded individuals who actually do not have a stake in the current "power dynamics" -- I could post during the Twitter hack -- is "part" (2).
Where are the "scientific" and "rational" studies on the du jour mob tactics cum "remedy" to social injustice? As a spectator it is reminiscent of previous attempts at "remedy", notably the Cultural Revolution by Chairman Mao. That didn't really solve anything, did it?
Distorted power dynamics certainly should be addressed. There are actually quite a few elephants in the room that aren't even discussed. But please do not make a claim that mobilized mob squads are a "proven remedy to fix power dynamic's distortions in society". The historical verdict on this is: one group of power holders replaces another.
> dealing with them deserves less priority unless and until they structurally hold that power and receive the benefits.
I don't know if it's your intention, but the way you phrased it makes it sound like you don't think we should do anything about racism unless it's being done by whatever group is currently the most powerful. Considering that white people are a global minority, it doesn't seem to make much sense to say that posting anti-white/anti-semitic statements to a global audience isn't a big deal just because the person who said it happens to live in a country where they are a minority.
What you're describing seems to me like a rationalization for injustice and hypocrisy. If you want to know what the power dynamics are, look at who is held accountable for their actions and who isn't.
This, but also, the premise isn’t even valid. Race is an extremely poor predictor of power or success relative to other variables. People are just lazy with stats, driven by an ideological agenda, and selective about the studies they decide to focus on. Also, critical examinations where they are most necessary are not morally fashionable, and can even cost one their job.
Even if this were true, which it isn’t, pushing this message leads to worse outcomes for the populations in question. If you are taught that the system is against you and you have no agency, the only rational response is not to try, and instead just harbor resentment. This perpetuates a vicious cycle and leaves everyone worse off. Learned helplessness is real.
We have a prominent AI researcher being ostracized for a tweet (and presumably a more general attitude we don't see out of context) that marginalizes people of color, reflecting a larger problem of systemic racism, particularly in academia. Neither his attitude nor the reaction to it seem productive in my mind. Online forums have always been prone to everyone shouting over everyone else until the loudest voice wins.
Can you explain how his tweet “marginalizes people of color”?
His position, from what I understand, is that the ML algorithm which reconstructed a photo of Obama as white was biased solely because the training data set consisted of mostly white people. If it had been a more diverse data set then the algorithm would have behaved more appropriately.
The complaint is that he was being dismissive of racism in the field by saying it's just the training data. Technically correct, but missing the larger picture - who is generating this training data? Doesn't his comment subtly attempt dismiss the issue entirely? Deployed ML systems are notorious for these kinds of biases. He was offloading the criticism to engineers building these data sets, as though he could not have any possible role to play as a researcher. He was thus shot down for a seemingly innocuous comment that is set against a very large backdrop of racism that tends to get ignored. Haven't you read White Fragility three times over by now?? /s
On the one hand this guy was pushed off twitter for a seemingly innocuous comment - one that some people just happened to take as insensitive. The type of comment that, in fact, increasingly large numbers of people seek out to take offense at - so it seems like an overreaction. On the other hand this is twitter, exactly where these types of narratives play out, he was unable to defend his position competently or even acknowledge the criticisms against him, gave up, and walked off.
I think I see the disconnect then: ML researchers are often the people who build the datasets. Datasets aren't something that grow in the wild, nor is it usually a task for ML engineers. So the original tweet wasn't really offloading the problem; it was self-criticism (though it's understandable it didn't sound like it).
It's insane to me just how much of the news content is taken directly from Twitter while newsrooms and investigative journalism is systematically defunded. How can this be reversed?
I pay $5/month to get Matt Taibbi’s emails, usually about two a month with in depth research and reporting.
In general I like to spend about five minutes a day quickly reviewing news on Apple News+. Otherwise I read good books, with a little time on HN. I use Twitter and FB for shamelessly plugging my books. Anyway, this works for me.
As a counter-argument, maybe the thing people are willing to pay for is the insights of a single individual (like https://www.gwern.net/ which makes a decent chunk of money from patreon), not the entire organization (such as a news paper?)
There's always going to be people who're interested in insightful, well researched articles and opinions. Isn't a part of the problem connecting these people, to the actual individuals doing posting in a more transparent way than a news-paper?
Having this as the default would pose problems of it's own, and make some of the deeper journalism requiring months/years to complete more difficult though.
It's also totally different than most journalists who push out stories left and right on topics they have layman understanding of. The quality and depth of work is significantly higher. I would pay for news reporting from gwern than random journalist.
You have it backwards. News content is now being reported directly via Twitter, because the newsrooms and journalists have proven they can't be trusted. They were never "defunded", their customers left because the product is low quality and biased.
News content is being reported directly on Twitter because the internet spoiled consumers into not having to pay for reporting. The online advertising model effectively did "defund" publications by forcing them to write low-quality content that people would click on instead of paying for.
It's also being reported there because it's an insanely fast way to reach people. Instead of them having to check the news organization's main page to see if anything happened, they can subscribe to their account on Twitter, turn on notifications and get it the moment it breaks.
Granted, Twitter is still a horrible place for long-form news (which is why it links to the full articles) and an even worse one for discussions. Which is why a different platform for instant updates could be beneficial, since news will have to adapt anyway.
> Instead of them having to check the news organization's main page to see if anything happened, they can subscribe to their account on Twitter, turn on notifications and get it the moment it breaks.
If only there was a really simple way to syndicate all this content that all websites could follow and multiple clients could consume...
There is but, realistically, people have moved away from it. Getting someone to try a new thing is hard. Getting someone to go back to an old thing once they're hooked on a new one is harder.
The instantaneous nature of the internet is one of the single biggest contributors to the low-quality nature of news content today, and in my opinion, needs to be rethought.
The reason is that publications no longer have the benefit of the doubt when they publish something wrong. If a story with a malicious source runs, that publication can't argue that they were duped by a bad source. The community will automatically accuse them of pushing fake news, regardless of whether or not it was intentional. The media no longer has any benefit of the doubt due to the intense political opposition.
Also contributing to this is a publication's desire to be first to run a breaking story. This creates a scenario where a publisher has to decide between waiting for additional sourcing to corroborate a big story or risking losing out to a competitor who may run the story first.
It's one of the main reasons that I try not to actively support Twitter-driven journalism and instead put my journalism dollars towards publications that do long-form writing that takes time and patience to produce. The late-breaking Twitter world is just too often a Kobayashi Maru situation for publications.
Sadly, I believe it’s too late. Attention span is getting shorter for many. Not many would want to scroll a news article. These days almost everyone I speak with is saying they’re busy, not enough time. So, where would they even find time to watch a 30-60 minute newscast.
Which is why Twitter is probably the GoTo for news.
I don't buy this completely. I see an enormous amount of redundancy to fill space in newspapers and online news media.
An article from vice on any company will mention at least three of their own previous posts and rehash company evil before getting to the point. They will add a paragraph full of questions with no answers and another one for speculations that are only somewhat related.
Why bother with that when you can get to the point using a small tweet?
There is something online news agencies are doing wrong otherwise you wouldn't see so many startups opening news sumarizers, curation etc.
That is also true. I would come across an article that interest me, however, there’s so much fluff that I would scroll 2-3 times and then just move on.
Pardon my ignorance but what exactly was the issue with what LeCun said in that response? I feel like it's a pretty agreed upon paradigm that feeding an AI/ML algo with biased data for training will make the AI/ML algo biased. That seems unsurprising and like a perfectly valid statement so there must be something I'm missing and, at least from the article, I couldn't glean what the issue was since the response was just "I'm sick of this framing" without any kind of additional information. If I'm reading it correctly, the issue maybe was that he didn't go far enough and put too much emphasis on data set bias?
I don't know; I had exactly the same questions. FWIW I work in ML, and I've said similar things as LeCun.
The thing is, I would love to help (and listen) to those who have studied this extensively. But there wasn't any information to go on. The article makes it seem like they shouted him down while delivering no actionable advice.
Yeah... it's nearly impossible to figure out what's going on after the fact since the conversation is split amongst so many different Twitter threads. The best I can discern is that his response is dismissive of systemic issues that affect results and introduce biases but, to me, that feels like he's getting jumped on for not being general enough in his criticism.
More specifically, IIRC the claim was that he's using the data as an excuse, instead of adjusting the data so the ML algorithm gets the desired un-biased result.
My understanding was that it was mostly coming from activists that don't really understand how AI/ML works.
> The article makes it seem like they shouted him down while delivering no actionable advice.
Worse. It makes it seem like they shouted him down while not even delivering any concrete criticism. If that's accurate you can't blame LeCun for leaving. And looking at your typical political "discussion" on Twitter, I wouldn't be surprised if it is.
>I feel the same way about cancel culture on twitter -- it is bad in the short term, but if it incentivizes people like Yann Lecunn to leave it -- it reduces the importance of the medium itself.
Given that Twitter is the only platform where interesting ML discussions happen daily with a large amount of actual researchers and practitioners talking about their work directly I'm not sure in what way it's better to have people leave without an alternative. The value just decreases for everyone.
Yes, if only it was so easy to solve coordination problems to be able to freely abandon mostly working solutions before we've even done so. Sadly, that's not the world we live in.
I feel like we need domain-specific Twitter-alike services, that anyone can read (and send DMs on), but only people "in" that domain can make public tweets on.
Not a community-specific service, precisely; I'm not talking about the sort of partitioning StackExchange does. I wouldn't want a CS-people-only Twitter. (Cross-pollination of ideas between fields is important!)
Nor am I talking about individual independent forums that have their own specific (rivalrous) memberships, where you can't expect network effects to guarantee that J Random Peer-in-your-domain will definitely already be a member. Everyone you wish would be there, should already be there. Like Twitter.
But different domains of discourse have different standards/norms, and it'd be helpful to keep each such domain separate, such that people don't try to interact using conflicting standards/norms; but rather will know what the primary set of norms are for their current domain, and will "mode-switch" to using those when they're in that domain.
For example, all of "academia" is one domain of discourse, with its own social norms.
So we could have one domain-specific Twitter-alike where, to join (and not get banned), you'd have to obey the rules of academic conduct; and to get verified (and so to make public tweets), you'd have to be actively in academia in some way (e.g. maybe you'd need to submit proof-of-identity in the form of the DOI of an academic paper you've written.)
Then you could have a separate domain for politicians and talking-heads, where the rules of discourse to follow are those of a political debate, and where user verification happens through a petition of non-verified users, proving that the user has "constituents."
I would imagine a blended app where one user account could be active on multiple domains at once, perhaps even with new posts from them collected onto a merged timeline for easy reading; but it'd be important to make clear, for each post, which domain it's in (e.g. by embedding the post within a background theme that represents that domain.)
I'd also imagine that getting verified in a second domain after already being verified as something else, would be harder, requiring a manual audit of your specific case. (Sort of like how multi-classing in Dungeons & Dragons is something you're supposed to have a long talk with the DM about.) Not every economist is both a professional academic and a professional political commentator; most are a professional at one and an amateur at the other.
There is no single forum that contains as participants all of academia (and nobody else), with public viewership and the ability to DM the participants.
(One might say that Usenet did, at one point, contain all of academia within a few of its hierarchy-roots; but there's nothing stopping random quacks from posting to those. Imagine a version of the 80s where Usenet's sci. hierarchy would only accept posts from actual science departments in universities and research institutions—but where it was still mirrored for reading everywhere else—and you'd be closer.)
Really, what I badly re-invented here, was scientific journals, but with a 140-character publication limit ;)
Or IRC channels in +v mode, but where there's only 10 of them, and each one has millions of unvoiced members and thousands of voiced members.
This seems great in theory but how do you "verify" these types of domains without also instituting some kind of gatekeeping? What's stopping someone from setting up or putting together a "medical" domain where that domain promotes anti-vax ideals. All it takes is for the first person to get verified to hold that ideal and then gatekeep all the other approvals through that lens. Additionally, to use your example, someone could be verified in "academia" by submitting proof of identity or an academic paper but does that then mean that "academia" also needs sub-domains to prevent people like Ben Carson from being leaders in certain fields while also being, arguably, off the deep end in other areas? He's a well-respected doctor in a specific field but also completely ignorant in other medical fields.
I don't have a solution but am mostly just curious if this kind of platform is even possible with the number of people online now. It's not like the early days of the internet where there were technical challenges that you had to overcome to make your voice heard. Now, it's so easy to say whatever anyone wants but also so easy to take ownership of the platforms for people to say what's accurate. Case in point: There are 12 users that make up the moderators for something like the top 200 sub-reddits on Reddit where 80%+ of the userbase is.
I mean, like I said, domains are about having shared social norms, not about being part of the same community. One can be ostracized from a given community while still sharing that community's norms. There can be divisions and fractiousness within a domain. (There certainly is within the domain of "all of academia"!)
The point of "discourse domains" as a concept isn't to create echo-chambers of (correct or not) majority views. It doesn't aim to solve every problem that moderation, ignore-lists, etc. solve. The point really isn't to limit what people say at all; it's to limit how they say it, per domain (or rather, to make it clear what the proper "how" is, when you're in this space vs. that space.) It's to reconstruct a sense of there being a conversation happening within a context of particular sub-cultural discourse norms at all, vs. the current situation we're in with the Internet where every open-membership website has the de-facto discourse norms of "a protest in the public square."
As for why you'd want that—if it isn't immediately apparent: people who are enculturated to a given domain's norms, see certain things as being offensive (norm-violating), and these things differ per domain (but not really per community, given two communities both "of" the same domain.) So isolating domains from one-another, means that you eliminate "impedance mismatch" conflicts where everyone is trying their best but the difference in discourse norms makes everyone think that everyone else is acting in bad faith. It especially helps out the people for whom the norms of "a protest in the public square" are quite far from the norms of the domain they're enculturated to.
(Have you ever seen a scientist argue with a politician on Twitter? That's an impedance mismatch. Each one is trying to get different things out of the conversation, and so neither side can actually say anything without it seeming to be an act of rhetorical sabotage when seen through the lens of the other side. And further, the politician is closer to the norms of "a protest in the public square", while the scientist is further, so usually the scientist is seen by Twitter users as committing the greater faux-pas in the process.)
> This seems great in theory but how do you "verify" these types of domains without also instituting some kind of gatekeeping?
I hope it's clear, here, that the point isn't credentialism / closed-membership communities. You aren't trying to detect whether someone e.g. "is a scientist"; you're only trying to detect whether someone is best modelled as being offended by the set of things scientists are offended by.
"Verification" (in the sense of Twitter's blue checkmark) is a KYC mechanism, not a credential per se. It helps people to find a specific person on Twitter by their name. It doesn't assert that they're a member in good standing of their field; someone could be "verified" for being infamous just as much as for being famous. It just ensures that the people who "squat" on names are the people you'd expect.
The suggestions in my previous comment for verification strategies (and for linking verification to "voiced-ness" within the domain), just take this a step further: they're suggestions of processes that would be applicable to anyone who really is enculturated to a given domain's norms. They make it hard for people "uninitiated" in the domain to come in, but not by requiring a credential or a skill test; rather, they just test for something trivial that people only learn to do after first enculturating to the domain's norms.
There's no academic who hasn't written a paper—you have to write one to complete a master'...
> is the only platform where interesting ML discussions happen daily with a large amount of actual researchers and practitioners talking about their work directly
Twitter has nothing to do with national security. Official national communication comes from offical government offices through official communication channels and/or on official letterhead. Twitter is a social message board, whether people want to believe that or not. Nothing said on twitter has to be true or accurate or authentic.
Including the White House. "The President is the President of the United States, so they're considered official statements by the President of the United States"
You're making a serious is-ought confusion here. Everything in your post is obviously how the world should be, but is just as obviously not how it currently is.
When the government itself says “our tweets are official statements”, it’s not that people are dumb for getting official news from Twitter. The government is using Twitter for exactly that purpose. Donald Trump’s Twitter account is not “unofficial sources”, it is the definition of an official source according to the president himself.
This is naive. Whether you like it or not, the president of USA frequently tweets, and many of his tweets contain news that has not yet been released through official channels. Multiple former Trump staffers have learned about their own dismissals from Trump tweets. He also tweets inflammatory things about other world leaders ("little rocket man") and influences market participants ("I LOVE GOYA").
At a certain point I think cashing out investment funds which benefit from the current administration's policies qualifies as being complicit with those policies.
We should either reject those gains or re-invest them directly in initiatives countering the staggering disregard for human health, education, and well-being, currently being done.
Today, numerous important organizations and projects have blown off the original distributed Web architecture and email, and embraced Twitter and/or Facebook as their primary public communication channels.
Why embrace something you dont control, cannot trust, and can have turned off at any moment? Just because people are there? Ease of convenience outweighs accountability and control? Seems very short sighted when its just as easy to post official communication on your own media and tweet links to it?
You are underestimating the level of ease/convenience and overestimating the simplicity of managing "your own media".
For example, think about your Town-Name House of Pizza. It really is a lot to ask for that operation to also include a sys admin and in-house hardware on top of everything else.
Why bother when you can just put your menu, hours, closures, and grubhub/chownow/whatever link on Facebook for free and get the same result?
The bulk of Twitter users don't know this. And it became more than a "social message board" once the general public realized they couldn't trust the media to be unbiased.
Speaking as someone who frequently digs themselves into holes when they discover they’re wrong, I would recommend stopping while the hole is only extremely deep.
The federal government of the United States conducts official foreign policy over Twitter. End of story, straight from the horse’s mouth. That has national security implications when Twitter gets hacked.
I can't stop thinking about what would happen if someone steals Trumps Twitter account and starts sending fake tweets. I am sure the White House would classify it as a security issue.
I was imagining how much worse this hack could have been if a tweet came from @RealDonaldTrump:
I tried to be nice to Little Rocket Man but the time for games is over. China has not been helpful in keeping @KimJongUn in check. We will now take matters into our own hands.
Kinda surreal to think about a fake tweet having a real geopolitical implication where people's lives are at risk.
Which would indicate a terribly lack of security awareness at Twitter. Security of your primary business and customers should not be considered optional.
Twitter employees were duped by social engineering. Hacker gained access to their credentials, used them to get access to internal Twitter tools that allowed them to takeover Accounts. Not very sophisticated but still alarming that random Twitter employees have access to this kind of tool and don't have better internal account security.
They did not apply social engineering to a random set of Twitter employees. Simply identifying this select subset of employees indicates sophistication.
My point was more that they didn't need to have access to some 0 day exploit to do this. There's been a lot of "conspiracy" type talk online that this was actually a 3 letter agency showing off their Twitter backdoor.
Are you just guessing? I don't see anyone reporting this.
I also highly doubt normal Twitter employees can impersonate any users. I would seriously hope it's less than 100 people with the DB or server access necessary to tweet as someone they don't have auth credentials for.
Edit: "We detected what we believe to be a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools."
A recent thought I had. Before a service can be authorized for use by public officials, it should go through security compliance similar to PCI, PII, or SOX. Most public offices obviously don't command armies nor nuclear codes, but ones that do should be subject to more rigorous vetting of the services they are authorized to use.
Had the recent vulnerability been a different message from, say, a certain prominent Twitter account, there could be very, very, very disastrous results.
Stupid questions: Did the attacks involve a duped Twitter employee changing high-value account emails? Without a second person reviewing? And wouldn't PCI have something against that?
AFAIK (the spec is huge) PCI-DSS doesn't have a two-man rule requirement. Twitter is arguably doing everything PCI-DSS requires as its good security hygiene anyways.
PCI is about payment cardholder data (credit card data). So, no, cause Twitter is free and you are not sending credit card data to them. However, if you applied the principals of PCI to all user data then possibly yes. The more valuable practice would be anti-phishing training for CS employees.
Anti-phishing training (and PCI in general) has made very little difference in my experience as a practitioner. Like most security remedies, there is no data to back up its efficacy, and no standard for how it should be done.
A single duped employee changing dozens of accounts emails? A dozen of duped employees? This feels very unlikely. Some sort of admin tool must have been used.
I know the admin tool was involved (at least from the reports). I mean that an external party masquerading as legit users was duping employees into changing that stuff (possibly via the admin tool).
This is the most well-intended (I hope, assuming no ill intent on your part) but dangerous message I've read today.
What you are really saying here that public officials should only be allowed to publish on approved enterprise communications systems that has the budget to pay for compliance certifications.
I think Facebook and Twitter would love this kind of regulatory capture because it would cement their position, hindering startups from taking over in their space (which, we know, is prone to being out-innovated every 5 years or so).
Having worked professionally in information security for a while now, let me tell you these kinds of certificates mean very little for actual security.
Oof yeah you're not wrong! It was well-intended for sure, but you've made a good point regarding regulatory capture. How can we achieve both a) increased security beyond a your basic acronym certificate* and b) democratized access to startups?
Which set of levers can we pull to achieve the best outcome for everyone, I have no idea. Is it fair to compare this to the current aviation dilemmas? I don't want just anyone building a passenger jet, slapping a compliance sticker on it, and hop on board; very high stakes system. Yet at the same time, it's clear to see how Boeing infected the FAA to simply get their way and lockout newcomers.
* are PCI, PII, SOX, et. al. really that trivial and meaningless?
Knowing that absolute security is a myth, it makes more sense to assume all the systems are insecure and proceed from there, placing only the appropriate level of trust in any system.
Public officials should be completely banned from using communication systems that are not state owned for professional purposes. It makes absolutely no sense that politicians use Twitter as an official communication channel.
How do you plan on telling Trump, who had a sizable Twitter following before he was elected, then leveraged social media to grow his political fanbase, that all of the sudden on Jan 1, he can't use Twitter?
We have a mechanism for doing just that: Congress. A law that government communication must be primarily through an official channel (even if it is also mirrored to unofficial channels).
This was exactly my first thought when I saw Sen. Hawley's open letter to Twitter, aghast at the idea that the President's own account could be affected by this. I share his concern, but not his determination of blame. It is not a private company's job to protect the communications of our government. It is the job of our government's defense and intelligence apparatus. They can't do that job without the requirement for communication to be done through channels they control.
That's a great take from an idealist perspective. The reality is that governments are under-resourced and under-funded for these types of things and American citizens aren't going to register for a state-owned version of Twitter nor fund it. They're already on Twitter and governments should meet them where they're already at.
The last 4 years have been a terrible example of how to interact on Twitter as a politician, but in general the idea of a politician being able to connect directly with their citizens is still a great dream. I'm not sure if social media is the right approach, but right now I don't think there is a great alternative.
Especially when during campaigning it is necessary to grow that kind of following organically and to leverage social media. Saying that the day you get elected that you must disable your online presence feels like the wrong solution.
I do think there should be some higher standard though. I just am not sure what it is. The same threats exist in Email that exist on Twitter in a lot of ways. I can register "JoeBidden.com" and email you about "my" campaign all day. There's no official registration of your "official" domain anywhere. And even if there were, that can be hacked too.
Or perhaps a more generous reading of gp is official message should only be issued via official channels (which have been vetted for security) and everything else is just pr only.
If that's the case I wonder if heads of state and aministrations of other countries have similar protections. It's crazy how Twitter has become a channel for broadcasting important messages and PSA by administrations all over the world.
How about no? The cure to bad / fake speech is more speech. (which is exactly what happened here). There's little to prevent a newspaper or TV station from doctoring media, selectively quoting, or just making something up completely and claiming that Joe Biden or Donald Trump said it. Why should twitter be regulated when other operators of the press are not?
If this Twitter hack has profound national security implications, then Twitter itself already has profound national security implications that weren’t being appropriately recognized or addressed.
I think that's true and is definitely part of the larger discussion; when a platform has the power to begin a war; maybe more eyes should be focused on the responsibility of the platform.
There’s a small part of my brain that wonders what the vacuum effect of twitter suddenly disappearing would even look like. Partly terrified but infinitely curious to poke that hypothetical techno-philosophical bear.
This kind of scenario is exactly why I imagined that the very first thing that the secret service would do is snap Trump's phone in half and throw it in the bin. Yet another thing to add to the long list of new legislation that needs to be written, though I'm not sure how it do it. "All government officials using twitter must also post the PGP signature of any tweets they plan to make BEFORE they post them to twitter, and also post them to _some other service_ as well."
Probably not the intent, but the consequence of the twitter hack was actually a benevolent psyop to remind all world leaders to not take any given tweet too seriously. White hat of the decade. Unironically might have done more for world peace than anyone in 2020.
A white hat would not have used a real bitcoin address in the message. This was a gray hat, at best. I'm curious if anyone actually fell for the scam.
Considering the millions of people who follow the collective accounts effected, even if 1% were stupid enough to be dupped (and yet know how transfer bitcoin), that might have been quite a windfall for the hacker.
The president had made official communications first, and perhaps only via Twitter and has claimed it is an official channel for the president. There have been a few times people have found out about being fired or policies announced via Twitter with very little follow up to the people on the ground.
For example, if Trump's account had tweet something akin to "all us borders and ports are closed" it would be expected for all border agents to immediately close ports of entry, as similar happened during the original travel ban.
Well, for example, the claim is that Barack Obama and Joe Biden had their Twitter accounts hacked as well. You could easily have put words in their mouth that would tip the electoral balance, especially if it happened a few months from now. Being able to discredit a candidate, or confuse their followers, has national security implications.
So Twitter is an echochamber within an echochamber.
Were Biden's or Obama's accounts to be hacked, the only effect it would have would likely be with only the extreme fringe of the party. Most Democrats, and virtually all Republicans, would never see it.
The hacker could have done something subtle to possibly game all those Wall Street AI bots they've surely plugged into the Twitter firehose by now. No one would have been the wiser. Instead we got Obama demanding Bitcoins which is so outrageously obvious that we now might finally stand a chance of loosening those pursestrings so we can do more to improve infrastructural weaknesses. Good show.
Yeah, a "cleverer" hack would be to buy stocks, and then get the accounts of Obama, Biden, etc, to tweet "We have the cure!" and link to a faked press release about a cure for Covid (how hard would it be to hack a pharma company's website?). The stock markets would probably go through the roof, and you can make a nice profit, and you'd look like just another Robinhood trader.
People are underestimating the impact a Twitter hack would have on the world. Imagine if instead of doing an overt hack, a malicious actor instead use the POTUS account to tweet something extremely controversial, such as a racial slur. The fallout would be immense, and can single-handedly swing an election.
The hacking of Hillary Clinton's email, is only the tip of the iceberg. We are at the dawn of weaponized-cyberhacks as a way of subverting political systems.
Twitter as a platform is engineered to be pithy, immediate, and constantly engaging with as little forethought as possible. It's a machine for viral stupidity. You could call it a mis-communication tool.
I get why people like to use it, but people also like slowing down to stare at car crashes on the highway. Maybe it's not a good thing.
Twitter was originally intended as a way to post personal statuses. Short messages that are self-contained enough to require little elaboration.
Only when people started using Twitter to have long-form political and philosophical conversations of controversial topics, things that inherently require more than 120 characters to properly communicate, did it devolve into a mis-communication tool.
I wonder whether this problem can be mitigated by signing tweets with cryptography signature. Then people can put the public key in the blockchain or third-party websites. The user can sign the message with their private key and other people can verify it with the user's public key.
So if the attacker can gain access of Twitter system, at least they can not forge the message. But of course they can do other damages, such as reading private messages.
206 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 278 ms ] threadLove to. How about Global Thermonuclear War?
HOW ABOUT A NICE GAME OF CHESS?
Here's a national security concern: a president announced he's going to war. Or a military tweets they've lost control of their nukes... Or reports a widespread network communication fault and advises all personal to communicate through a specific channel (which might degrade security)
If you were hoping for national security concerns, don't bother reading the article.
Conceivably: yes. Likely: no.
Don't get all confident about this. Lots of "secret" Trump voters have become angry at the MSM/Dems and are gaming the polls that say Biden will win.
While it'd likely get resolved before things went nuclear, you could probably do some major damage while people scramble into action before communication channels get straightened out and verify things.
If they were in it for the money, this would have been the jackpot. All those Drumpfels pouring bitcoins into the account...
But they say they're sending the money to "the right places". Maybe those "right places" aren't aligned with ripping off Drumpfels.
A hack to Trump's account might cause a little havoc, but as the vast majority of Americans do not use Twitter, and get their news elsewhere, I doubt it would cause much harm beyond what we already see on a daily basis. The White House and other real news outlets would just issue statements publicizing the hack and that would be the end of it.
`And that makes you wonder what contingencies the company has put into place in the event that it is someday taken over not by greedy Bitcoin con artists, but state-level actors or psychopaths. After today it is no longer unthinkable, if it ever truly was, that someone take over the account of a world leader and attempt to start a nuclear war.`
It's pretty disingenuous if you read the article and still says there's nothing there and then repeat the same thing the article wrote.
The other 95% of the article was recap of what every article says about the incident, or otherwise not related to national security...
I was excited to read any possible national security implications, perhaps things I wasn't even thinking of... And I was disappointed that the 2 sentences you posted, buried in the tail of a rather long article, were the justification for the headline "profound national security implications"...
I at least hypothesized potential national security risks, instead of making vague national security claims... The article is using those 2-3 sentences to give a scarier headline to drive clicks, when it's not much better than the other stories already on here.
I wouldn't worry about that. Twitter's anti-violence tweet policy will censor any proclamation of war.
Or maybe they just didn't want to shake the hornet's nest.
After that incident I doubt the regular employee admin panel has access to it. Probably a few accounts require special admin privileges (world leader accounts I assume).
Which would be a much more reasonable explanation than the conspiracies being floated and could also imply that Twitter has thought about the "national security" scenarios in the article.
https://twitter.com/TwitterGov/status/926267806261407744
You shouldn't be able to get away with something like that.
An account on a private service was deleted. Not a brilliant move. But not something that merits more than being fired and possibly pursued for money damages.
Pretty sure Twitter communicated after that that they took precautions that this won't be able to happen again.
I guess the question is why other high profile accounts like Obama's weren't secured the same way.
[1] https://www.countable.us/articles/804-trump-tweets-transgend...
Could whoever flagged this care to explain?
"Justice Department lawyer Jennifer Utrecht in her reply [in a Supreme Court case] acknowledged the president’s tweets are official government statements"
[bracketed text inserted for context]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/legal-issues/can-presid...
Trump used Twitter to threaten thinly veiled war with North Korea in response to North Korean missile tests, and yet a few months later he was shaking hands with Kim Jong Un.
In some ways, Trump's use of Twitter to A/B test would lessen the impact should a hacker gain access to the account, since most people would probably just dismiss it as "Trump being Trump".
Anyone treating Twitter as a gospel truth is an idiot.
I feel the same way about cancel culture on twitter -- it is bad in the short term, but if it incentivizes people like Yann Lecunn to leave it -- it reduces the importance of the medium itself.
edit: i mean this in good faith since that question is an incredibly complicated one involving power dynamics and systemic issues that can't be boiled down to a simplistic answer. why the downvotes?
Check out the recent spate of black athletes and celebrities posting openly anti-Semitic comments on social media (one directly (mis)quoting Hitler re: Jews) with zero repercussions.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nba/2020/07/08/stephen...
https://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory/jewish-leader...
https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/hip-hop/9400472/i...
A really thoughtful piece about this by Kareem Abdul Jabbar here too:
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/kareem-abdul-jabbar-i...
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/15/entertainment/nick-cannon-via...
How about Ice Cube, Stephen Jackson, DeSean Jackson, Dwyane Wade, etc. and all those who supported the comments or brushed them off as "speaking their truth" or some other nonsense? They will face no consequences, because, again, racism is deemed okay in the current climate as long as it's aimed correctly.
Can you even _imagine_ the absolute chaos that would rein if a white NBA player started quoting David Duke to millions of followers, and a bunch of white NBA players and commentators supported them?
Shut the fuck up, you vile, dishonest, race war loving piece of shit.
> Can you even _imagine_ the absolute chaos that would rein if...
I think everyone has their own media diet, influenced partly by their own choices and partly by algorithms. Your media diet likely has a huge effect on whose reactions you see and thus which reactions you perceive to be "brushing something off" or "absolute chaos."
But at the same time, these are well known public figures broadcasting openly racist and anti-Semitic thoughts to millions of people.
I'm not completely sure what to make of it.
>“When you have a person that has the lack of pigment, the lack of melanin, they know that they will be annihilated,” Mr. Cannon said during the June podcast. “So therefore, however they got the power, they have the lack of compassion — melanin comes with compassion, melanin comes with soul. We call it soul — we’re soul brothers and sisters — that’s the melanin that connects us, so the people that don’t have [melanin] are a little, and I’m going to say this carefully, are a little less.”
>“They’re acting out of fear, they’re acting out of low self-esteem, they’re acting out of a deficiency,” he continued. “So therefore, the only way that they can act is evil. They have to rob, steal, rape, kill in order to survive. So then, these people who didn’t have what we have — and when I say we, I speak of the melanated people — they had to be savages. They had to be barbaric because they’re in these Nordic mountains. They’re in these rough environments. They’re acting as animals, so they’re the ones that are actually closer to animals. They’re the ones that are actually the true savages.”
But he started talking about conspiracy theories relating to the illuminati and the Rothschilds (who, yes, happen to be jewish) and how they have all the power. Nothing derogatory or about jewish people in general that I saw.
Every single headline on my news page says he was anti-semetic and completely ignored the blatant racism. What fun times we are in.
??? what are you talking about.
If you want to do this accounting, I'm really here for you.
Also, he didn't lose his job here: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jul/16/nick-cannon...
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jul/16/nick-cannon...
The above is absolute horseshit which was posted here because the poster knew, with certainty, that they'd face no consequences for posting straight up false information meant to inflame race war.
Flip the script. Ban the lying race-war loving white supremacists.
https://cos.gatech.edu/facultyres/Diversity_Studies/Bertrand...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2915460/
The issue for myself and likeminded individuals who actually do not have a stake in the current "power dynamics" -- I could post during the Twitter hack -- is "part" (2).
Where are the "scientific" and "rational" studies on the du jour mob tactics cum "remedy" to social injustice? As a spectator it is reminiscent of previous attempts at "remedy", notably the Cultural Revolution by Chairman Mao. That didn't really solve anything, did it?
Distorted power dynamics certainly should be addressed. There are actually quite a few elephants in the room that aren't even discussed. But please do not make a claim that mobilized mob squads are a "proven remedy to fix power dynamic's distortions in society". The historical verdict on this is: one group of power holders replaces another.
You left out Stonewall, the Haymarket Riot, and the LA riots.
And maybe the Civil War or American Revolution.
I don't know if it's your intention, but the way you phrased it makes it sound like you don't think we should do anything about racism unless it's being done by whatever group is currently the most powerful. Considering that white people are a global minority, it doesn't seem to make much sense to say that posting anti-white/anti-semitic statements to a global audience isn't a big deal just because the person who said it happens to live in a country where they are a minority.
Even if this were true, which it isn’t, pushing this message leads to worse outcomes for the populations in question. If you are taught that the system is against you and you have no agency, the only rational response is not to try, and instead just harbor resentment. This perpetuates a vicious cycle and leaves everyone worse off. Learned helplessness is real.
His position, from what I understand, is that the ML algorithm which reconstructed a photo of Obama as white was biased solely because the training data set consisted of mostly white people. If it had been a more diverse data set then the algorithm would have behaved more appropriately.
On the one hand this guy was pushed off twitter for a seemingly innocuous comment - one that some people just happened to take as insensitive. The type of comment that, in fact, increasingly large numbers of people seek out to take offense at - so it seems like an overreaction. On the other hand this is twitter, exactly where these types of narratives play out, he was unable to defend his position competently or even acknowledge the criticisms against him, gave up, and walked off.
I pay $5/month to get Matt Taibbi’s emails, usually about two a month with in depth research and reporting.
In general I like to spend about five minutes a day quickly reviewing news on Apple News+. Otherwise I read good books, with a little time on HN. I use Twitter and FB for shamelessly plugging my books. Anyway, this works for me.
There's always going to be people who're interested in insightful, well researched articles and opinions. Isn't a part of the problem connecting these people, to the actual individuals doing posting in a more transparent way than a news-paper?
Having this as the default would pose problems of it's own, and make some of the deeper journalism requiring months/years to complete more difficult though.
It's also totally different than most journalists who push out stories left and right on topics they have layman understanding of. The quality and depth of work is significantly higher. I would pay for news reporting from gwern than random journalist.
Granted, Twitter is still a horrible place for long-form news (which is why it links to the full articles) and an even worse one for discussions. Which is why a different platform for instant updates could be beneficial, since news will have to adapt anyway.
If only there was a really simple way to syndicate all this content that all websites could follow and multiple clients could consume...
The reason is that publications no longer have the benefit of the doubt when they publish something wrong. If a story with a malicious source runs, that publication can't argue that they were duped by a bad source. The community will automatically accuse them of pushing fake news, regardless of whether or not it was intentional. The media no longer has any benefit of the doubt due to the intense political opposition.
Also contributing to this is a publication's desire to be first to run a breaking story. This creates a scenario where a publisher has to decide between waiting for additional sourcing to corroborate a big story or risking losing out to a competitor who may run the story first.
It's one of the main reasons that I try not to actively support Twitter-driven journalism and instead put my journalism dollars towards publications that do long-form writing that takes time and patience to produce. The late-breaking Twitter world is just too often a Kobayashi Maru situation for publications.
Which is why Twitter is probably the GoTo for news.
An article from vice on any company will mention at least three of their own previous posts and rehash company evil before getting to the point. They will add a paragraph full of questions with no answers and another one for speculations that are only somewhat related.
Why bother with that when you can get to the point using a small tweet?
There is something online news agencies are doing wrong otherwise you wouldn't see so many startups opening news sumarizers, curation etc.
I hadn’t seen that. Thanks for pointing it out.
The thing is, I would love to help (and listen) to those who have studied this extensively. But there wasn't any information to go on. The article makes it seem like they shouted him down while delivering no actionable advice.
My understanding was that it was mostly coming from activists that don't really understand how AI/ML works.
Worse. It makes it seem like they shouted him down while not even delivering any concrete criticism. If that's accurate you can't blame LeCun for leaving. And looking at your typical political "discussion" on Twitter, I wouldn't be surprised if it is.
Given that Twitter is the only platform where interesting ML discussions happen daily with a large amount of actual researchers and practitioners talking about their work directly I'm not sure in what way it's better to have people leave without an alternative. The value just decreases for everyone.
Not a community-specific service, precisely; I'm not talking about the sort of partitioning StackExchange does. I wouldn't want a CS-people-only Twitter. (Cross-pollination of ideas between fields is important!)
Nor am I talking about individual independent forums that have their own specific (rivalrous) memberships, where you can't expect network effects to guarantee that J Random Peer-in-your-domain will definitely already be a member. Everyone you wish would be there, should already be there. Like Twitter.
But different domains of discourse have different standards/norms, and it'd be helpful to keep each such domain separate, such that people don't try to interact using conflicting standards/norms; but rather will know what the primary set of norms are for their current domain, and will "mode-switch" to using those when they're in that domain.
For example, all of "academia" is one domain of discourse, with its own social norms.
So we could have one domain-specific Twitter-alike where, to join (and not get banned), you'd have to obey the rules of academic conduct; and to get verified (and so to make public tweets), you'd have to be actively in academia in some way (e.g. maybe you'd need to submit proof-of-identity in the form of the DOI of an academic paper you've written.)
Then you could have a separate domain for politicians and talking-heads, where the rules of discourse to follow are those of a political debate, and where user verification happens through a petition of non-verified users, proving that the user has "constituents."
I would imagine a blended app where one user account could be active on multiple domains at once, perhaps even with new posts from them collected onto a merged timeline for easy reading; but it'd be important to make clear, for each post, which domain it's in (e.g. by embedding the post within a background theme that represents that domain.)
I'd also imagine that getting verified in a second domain after already being verified as something else, would be harder, requiring a manual audit of your specific case. (Sort of like how multi-classing in Dungeons & Dragons is something you're supposed to have a long talk with the DM about.) Not every economist is both a professional academic and a professional political commentator; most are a professional at one and an amateur at the other.
(One might say that Usenet did, at one point, contain all of academia within a few of its hierarchy-roots; but there's nothing stopping random quacks from posting to those. Imagine a version of the 80s where Usenet's sci. hierarchy would only accept posts from actual science departments in universities and research institutions—but where it was still mirrored for reading everywhere else—and you'd be closer.)
Really, what I badly re-invented here, was scientific journals, but with a 140-character publication limit ;)
Or IRC channels in +v mode, but where there's only 10 of them, and each one has millions of unvoiced members and thousands of voiced members.
I don't have a solution but am mostly just curious if this kind of platform is even possible with the number of people online now. It's not like the early days of the internet where there were technical challenges that you had to overcome to make your voice heard. Now, it's so easy to say whatever anyone wants but also so easy to take ownership of the platforms for people to say what's accurate. Case in point: There are 12 users that make up the moderators for something like the top 200 sub-reddits on Reddit where 80%+ of the userbase is.
The point of "discourse domains" as a concept isn't to create echo-chambers of (correct or not) majority views. It doesn't aim to solve every problem that moderation, ignore-lists, etc. solve. The point really isn't to limit what people say at all; it's to limit how they say it, per domain (or rather, to make it clear what the proper "how" is, when you're in this space vs. that space.) It's to reconstruct a sense of there being a conversation happening within a context of particular sub-cultural discourse norms at all, vs. the current situation we're in with the Internet where every open-membership website has the de-facto discourse norms of "a protest in the public square."
As for why you'd want that—if it isn't immediately apparent: people who are enculturated to a given domain's norms, see certain things as being offensive (norm-violating), and these things differ per domain (but not really per community, given two communities both "of" the same domain.) So isolating domains from one-another, means that you eliminate "impedance mismatch" conflicts where everyone is trying their best but the difference in discourse norms makes everyone think that everyone else is acting in bad faith. It especially helps out the people for whom the norms of "a protest in the public square" are quite far from the norms of the domain they're enculturated to.
(Have you ever seen a scientist argue with a politician on Twitter? That's an impedance mismatch. Each one is trying to get different things out of the conversation, and so neither side can actually say anything without it seeming to be an act of rhetorical sabotage when seen through the lens of the other side. And further, the politician is closer to the norms of "a protest in the public square", while the scientist is further, so usually the scientist is seen by Twitter users as committing the greater faux-pas in the process.)
> This seems great in theory but how do you "verify" these types of domains without also instituting some kind of gatekeeping?
I hope it's clear, here, that the point isn't credentialism / closed-membership communities. You aren't trying to detect whether someone e.g. "is a scientist"; you're only trying to detect whether someone is best modelled as being offended by the set of things scientists are offended by.
"Verification" (in the sense of Twitter's blue checkmark) is a KYC mechanism, not a credential per se. It helps people to find a specific person on Twitter by their name. It doesn't assert that they're a member in good standing of their field; someone could be "verified" for being infamous just as much as for being famous. It just ensures that the people who "squat" on names are the people you'd expect.
The suggestions in my previous comment for verification strategies (and for linking verification to "voiced-ness" within the domain), just take this a step further: they're suggestions of processes that would be applicable to anyone who really is enculturated to a given domain's norms. They make it hard for people "uninitiated" in the domain to come in, but not by requiring a credential or a skill test; rather, they just test for something trivial that people only learn to do after first enculturating to the domain's norms.
There's no academic who hasn't written a paper—you have to write one to complete a master'...
arxiv.org
https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1283563228321263619?s=20
So you're saying Biden's isn't going to send me back my Bitcoin doubled?
Dang it.
https://edition.cnn.com/2017/06/06/politics/trump-tweets-off...
I think yesterdays events prove otherwise?
Can you elaborate?
> I see what you mean though, but society is largely dumb if they get official news from unofficial sources it's their fault no?
What does fault have to do with anything though?
The fact that high profile accounts were posting content not from the 'owner' of those accounts.
> Fault
A fool and his money and soon parted. These people are foolish.
When the government itself says “our tweets are official statements”, it’s not that people are dumb for getting official news from Twitter. The government is using Twitter for exactly that purpose. Donald Trump’s Twitter account is not “unofficial sources”, it is the definition of an official source according to the president himself.
We should either reject those gains or re-invest them directly in initiatives countering the staggering disregard for human health, education, and well-being, currently being done.
Example: Supernews, on the topic of Twitter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5Ff2X_3P_4
Today, numerous important organizations and projects have blown off the original distributed Web architecture and email, and embraced Twitter and/or Facebook as their primary public communication channels.
For example, think about your Town-Name House of Pizza. It really is a lot to ask for that operation to also include a sys admin and in-house hardware on top of everything else. Why bother when you can just put your menu, hours, closures, and grubhub/chownow/whatever link on Facebook for free and get the same result?
I appreciate it more when people are willing to do the work.
The federal government of the United States conducts official foreign policy over Twitter. End of story, straight from the horse’s mouth. That has national security implications when Twitter gets hacked.
Something along the lines of
> I’ve instructed the Pentagon to immediately launch an attack on North Korea and China, using any force necessary (even nuclear). God bless
Would do the trick
Which makes it really concerning, Twitter can essentially impersonate the President and influence the markets, start a war, etc
They did not apply social engineering to a random set of Twitter employees. Simply identifying this select subset of employees indicates sophistication.
I also highly doubt normal Twitter employees can impersonate any users. I would seriously hope it's less than 100 people with the DB or server access necessary to tweet as someone they don't have auth credentials for.
Edit: "We detected what we believe to be a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools."
https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/128359184646423347...
Had the recent vulnerability been a different message from, say, a certain prominent Twitter account, there could be very, very, very disastrous results.
AFAIK (the spec is huge) PCI-DSS doesn't have a two-man rule requirement. Twitter is arguably doing everything PCI-DSS requires as its good security hygiene anyways.
Yes, that is the charitable interpretation you could have safely assumed I meant.
What you are really saying here that public officials should only be allowed to publish on approved enterprise communications systems that has the budget to pay for compliance certifications.
I think Facebook and Twitter would love this kind of regulatory capture because it would cement their position, hindering startups from taking over in their space (which, we know, is prone to being out-innovated every 5 years or so).
Having worked professionally in information security for a while now, let me tell you these kinds of certificates mean very little for actual security.
Which set of levers can we pull to achieve the best outcome for everyone, I have no idea. Is it fair to compare this to the current aviation dilemmas? I don't want just anyone building a passenger jet, slapping a compliance sticker on it, and hop on board; very high stakes system. Yet at the same time, it's clear to see how Boeing infected the FAA to simply get their way and lockout newcomers.
* are PCI, PII, SOX, et. al. really that trivial and meaningless?
You are trying to close Pandora's Box.
This was exactly my first thought when I saw Sen. Hawley's open letter to Twitter, aghast at the idea that the President's own account could be affected by this. I share his concern, but not his determination of blame. It is not a private company's job to protect the communications of our government. It is the job of our government's defense and intelligence apparatus. They can't do that job without the requirement for communication to be done through channels they control.
Anything is possible through legislation, I'm not sure this is such a big leap.
Especially when during campaigning it is necessary to grow that kind of following organically and to leverage social media. Saying that the day you get elected that you must disable your online presence feels like the wrong solution.
I do think there should be some higher standard though. I just am not sure what it is. The same threats exist in Email that exist on Twitter in a lot of ways. I can register "JoeBidden.com" and email you about "my" campaign all day. There's no official registration of your "official" domain anywhere. And even if there were, that can be hacked too.
Let's remove the blue checks and make it difficult to know who's legit and who's impersonating people again. Twitter is used way too seriously.
I know that's the opposite of what Twitter as a company wants. But it'd be nice as a user.
I think they probably have a different authorization method. One that might be wholly separate from the ones of regular or blue check mark users.
Likely monitored by the NSA or something like that.
Or, we break up and/or shut down the platform.
Considering the millions of people who follow the collective accounts effected, even if 1% were stupid enough to be dupped (and yet know how transfer bitcoin), that might have been quite a windfall for the hacker.
For example, if Trump's account had tweet something akin to "all us borders and ports are closed" it would be expected for all border agents to immediately close ports of entry, as similar happened during the original travel ban.
That means the vast majority of Americans do not use Twitter.
And according to this (https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/04/24/sizing-up-tw...), about 80% of the tweets are made by 10% of the users, and most of them are disproportionately young Democrats.
So Twitter is an echochamber within an echochamber.
Were Biden's or Obama's accounts to be hacked, the only effect it would have would likely be with only the extreme fringe of the party. Most Democrats, and virtually all Republicans, would never see it.
Idiots with militaries behind them (with generals who are too chickenshit/dumb to defy orders) are still deadly.
The hacking of Hillary Clinton's email, is only the tip of the iceberg. We are at the dawn of weaponized-cyberhacks as a way of subverting political systems.
I get why people like to use it, but people also like slowing down to stare at car crashes on the highway. Maybe it's not a good thing.
Only when people started using Twitter to have long-form political and philosophical conversations of controversial topics, things that inherently require more than 120 characters to properly communicate, did it devolve into a mis-communication tool.
So if the attacker can gain access of Twitter system, at least they can not forge the message. But of course they can do other damages, such as reading private messages.