The Dark Side of Twittering a Revolution

You actually brought up something that has been bothering me, but which I thought was too silly to even speak of.

When War of the Worlds aired on October 30, 1938 over the radio it caused panic, since then we live in an ever more connected world. I hold conversations with people that a) ive never met B) that are on the polar ends of the world. and c) that are also connected to several hundred or even thousands of people at a keystroke.

So with this said, I believe if properly coordinated a “fake terrorist attack” could be executed.  While I rather not get into details of how such a thing could be done I would like to explore how enabling technologies like twitter could aid in such a sinister act. 

Many times I find my msgs on facebook youtube twitter and other services propagate through the near endless sea of the Internet at what appears to be light speed. Ultimately it would be nothing short of a “viral” message. only at the scale of the world! (holds pinky near mouth)

I know I know such a thing is impossible you say..
To that I say.

News flash (insert lie

Social media can indeed stir anger without substance. Here, two journalists conducted a social experiment by making a FaceBook group opposing the demolition of a well-known statue in Copenhagen.

In hours, thousands of people had joined and raged “How can they do it? We must intervene!” and the like. Until they found out, days later,  that no state or municipal authority had ever *considered* removing that statue.

Bolivian TV and Dutch radio fall for Air France hoax
http://adjix.com/6zfs

Again it’s only a matter of time…

Tick Tock

Well, texting from mobile phones was used to organise the riots in Cronulla a few years ago. Clearly, any form of communication that gets a message out to masses of people can be used to get out a destructive message to them. If it’s a form that evades (easy) government detection, then it entails that destructive messages can get out without (easy) government detection. But it also means that legitimate messages that the government wants to suppress can get out. Overall, given the never-ending attacks by governments of all persuasions on freedom of speech, I’d rather have these technologies exist than have the government able to see and control everything that is said to large audiences.

If I may paraphrase from another article in the IEET archives, written by Mike Treder. The first paragraph was written by Cascio. The last paragraph was talking about weapons, but I changed it to talk about hi tech communications.

“A cornerstone of the open future concept is that we should be striving towards a world that maximizes our flexibility in response to challenges. We will never have perfectly free choices when problems arise, but we are more likely to come up with good solutions under less-constrained conditions than we would if we were limited to a handful of options. The choice to pull back and say “let’s try something different” is an option that we should strive to maintain.”

But tech analyst George Dvorsky worries that Cascio’s idea may be too idealistic:

There is no precedent yet in human history where the pursuit of certain (information) technologies have been abandoned due to their potential risks. It is the nature of the (hi tech world) to be in a perpetual search for the most sophisticated technologies. . . Worse, once (the public) gains possession of a (tool such as Twitter), it will never relinquish it.

Guy Kawasaki on twitterfeed
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8u4Raaamuoo

very interesting twitter technology the creator puts it like this “it is like a nuclear weapon. “

If you automate enough feeds into one single twitter account you can potentially set off a twitter mass retweeting chain reaction as a major news event hits the web ei the death of MJ or our future fictional event discussed earlier.

IM very fasinated with this and have started a fully automated twitter bot experiment.

No more talk lets experiment shall we?

The experiment will conducted with this account
www.twitter.com/transalchemy2

I will not twit a single twit from it and lets see how far and fast this baby will go.  I will continuously feed it sources till it reaches 1 twit a second if possible and then we’ll proceed with phase two of this experiment.

for informational time capsule reason Today July 5
the account has

29
following  
58
followers  
103
updates

where do you think it will be just in 24 hours I dare ask? Any takers