A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on. — Winston Churchill
Jamais Cascio has been doing some informed thinking about the intersection of Twitter, botnets, misinformation, and systems hacking.
Two of my rules for constructing useful and interesting scenarios are to (a) think about what happens when seemingly disparate changes smash together, and (b) imagine how new developments might be misused. In both cases, the goal is to uncover something unexpected, but (upon reflection) disturbingly plausible. I’d like to lay out for you the chain of connections that lead me to believe that we’re on the verge of something big. …
A black hat hacker could, with ease, create a network of Twitter bots set to retweet each other on command, send @messages to important information hubs (a few of which would retweet stories further), and drive up the visibility of certain hashtags and keywords. Done with the right target and message, and at the right time, such a network could potentially trigger sudden swings in value of targeted shares. The drop in value need not last for long; trading systems that know the stories to be false could swiftly snap up the briefly-undervalued stock. Conversely, the attack could be done in a way to cripple a particular company or stock market, or even to distract journalists from another story.
Similarly, a Twitter bot network, retweeting/spreading misinformation, could potentially cause a media firestorm if the target was a politician. Even if the misinformation was corrected within the hour, the spread would be impossible to fully contain. Could something like this even swing an election?
I can assure you, as a heavily invested Twitter researcher, what Cascio describes is eminently plausible.