Twitter Terrorism

In our discussion about news and Twitter being used for the dispersion of news, I couldn't stop thinking about how we are pushing the publishing time of information being digested as news to a shorter and shorter period of time that does not allow for proper fact checking. As we have seen in the example about the flood (which is being repeated for the Fargo flood), a news event can be reported and virally spread through Twitter users at a very fast rate. To me, this leaves open the risk of having people (for whatever reason) utilize Twitter to cause havoc by reporting false events and having them rip through the Twitter ecosystem quickly without proper time for verification.

Let's say that you are a retail store chain and one of your competitors is opening a new store in an area downtown. You don't want this to be successful, so you hire a random college student to create a program reports on Twitter that a large fire is happening on that city block. That student had ripped the usernames and passwords of other local college students so they have access to many accounts, or they have skillfully created real looking people that local groups have started following due to their image and comments (perhaps even through engineered false Facebook pages). The accounts that this person has control over quickly spread the rumor about the fire and immediately the fire is verified through the chain by simulated other people. This could dramatically effect new store sales, eh?

This could even take a more dramatic turn if one believes a US Army report speaking about how Twitter (with its relative anonymity) could be used to manage terrorist attacks in real time. (link)