Careful with the Twitter there sport
Junior’s mean tweet about Halloween candy and socialism backfired, because roughly 30 thousand people found witty ways to tell Junior what a nasty little swine he is. Twitter dogpiles are bad, but the Trumps are dogpiling the whole damn world.
https://twitter.com/monteqzuma/status/925525517595561984
Fill her bucket with old candy left by her great-grandfather, then explain that she has more because she's smarter than all the other kids. https://t.co/0lbhHYyFe4
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) November 1, 2017
Good prep for when Mueller takes half her family and gives it to prison. Makes her costume a tad ironic though.
— Adam Burns (@ATWURNS) October 31, 2017
https://twitter.com/Bearpigman/status/925506848358305792
https://twitter.com/clmazin/status/925506078296588289
https://twitter.com/linnieloowho/status/925542629709893632
That last one made me say Oooooooo…
When my son was seven years old, he said to me “Mum, when you share, you get more.” He then explained that he meant that you didn’t just get more in a transactional sense (people will share their stuff with you), but that you “get more” friends, more bonding, more community, more connection, more joy, more love. HE WAS SEVEN. If he can get it at that age, then what the fuck is wrong with people like Trump Jr?
A little OT but did you see the story about Trump senior’s Twitter account being briefly disabled by a Twitter employee on their last day? Hats off to whoever did that but it’s a terrifying thought. If Twitter employees have access to do that, do they also have access to, say, fake a tweet from Trump? And if Twitter employees can do that, it doesn’t say great things about Twitter’s security. If employees can do it, so can hackers.
Given the insane influence Trump has on very terrible people and his completely irresponsible use of Twitter to conduct international ‘politics’ (such as declaring war), that could cause some serious mayhem. I have no doubt that this has been considered as a strategy by other nations. We’ve already seen what happened when Trump threatens other nations with annihilation. What would happen if he tweeted that a major company was in financial difficulty? What would happen if someone faked that tweet and it wasn’t corrected for a few minutes?
Twitter is a tar baby that was set up by the nation of AntiTrumponians to ensnare Trump.
And it worked. My lordy how it worked!
The tweetenergy is all put in by Trump, and to his way of thinking is 100% pro-Trump. But he hoists himself on his own petard with every tweet. Or should that be quack?
He’ll take half his daughter’s candy? That’s theft. And in her case that’s a Trump education. family values!
@latsot re Trump’s twitter account.
I don’t know much about Twitter in particular, but from the perspective of IT security in general:
Some Twitter employees do need to have access to disable accounts. If the system is properly configured however, it would be more difficult (but still not impossible) to spoof access, though it would likely be apparent to the user if this had happened (eg their pw would stop working). Security for such things combines technological and social safeguards, but the social safeguards tend to include consequences like termination. These of course would be much less of a deterrent for someone on their way out, which is why some companies withdraw privileges from departing employees sooner rather than later. On the other hand, it wouldn’t surprise me if there were people there who knew this might happen but “looked the other way”.
And in a true example about how distribution of Hallowe’en candy sadly reflects Trump’s America, here’s a story about a coffee shop that declined to distribute candy to African-American kids: http://www.theroot.com/coffee-shop-in-gentrified-bed-stuy-refused-to-give-cand-1820097973
@Theo:
I was speaking from the perspective of IT security in general too. I don’t disagree with anything you say.
However, you’re missing my point. While I’d never wish to judge certain Twitter users as more important than others, it is clear that some are capable of crazy amounts of collateral damage. Trump is by far the most obvious and extreme example of this in the world.
Twitter’s responsibilities are unprecedented largely because of Trump’s use of it as a mouthpiece for violence and insanity. I seriously don’t know what they’re playing at. With even a generally conservative mid-term view beholden to their shareholders, suspending Trump for violation of ToS would probably be the most profitable thing they could do. It would take the world by absolute fucking storm, whereas their cowardly re-inventing of the ToS to somehow not apply to him just makes everyone die a little more inside.
I think – as much as it pains me – that somebody ought to be keeping an eye on what happens to Trump’s account and applying slightly different rules to how employees are allowed to access it. Are you really telling me that operational security should give anyone access to Trump’s Twitter account, given the amount of insanity such access could generate?
Obviously, nobody gives a fuck about whether my account is deleted other than people who like to see pictures of my cat. It’s totally appropriate that there’s a different level of access between that and Trump’s account, though.
My IT department had a termination protocol that kicked in at least 24 hours prior to involuntary termination of people with admin access, but voluntary termination was less restrictive. My guess is that that’s what happened at Twitter, and it’s about to change if it hasn’t already.
@PieterB
I’ve never put in place a protocol like that. Such things exist only for the company to plausibly deny responsibility.
My approach as a manager on this issue was to be as scary as actual shit. It worked better in smaller firms than in larger ones but never underestimate sudden scariness as a legitimate security protocol.
I’m kidding. Sort of.
In reality, as a manager for many years I was a pussycat. My approach was to make sure my staff could do their jobs without having to worry about being fucked over by my bosses because I took that abuse instead. It worked fairly well as a rule. But when people did things to break that, or to hurt each other, I was known for being fairly terrifying. One of my more satisfying moments, although I wish it were not, was when I came back early from holiday to pick something up from my office and walked past the meeting room. Someone was saying “Latsot’s going to go spare. He’s going to go fucking SPARE”. It turned out to be a case of absolute stupid negligence which hurt a bunch of people and about which I did indeed go fucking spare.
Benevolent scariness. That’s the way to do management.
(“Spare” is British slang. It means to entirely lose it, terrifying everyone for miles around)
Agree with @latsot that Trump’s Twitter account ought to have an additional measure of care and attention. Also agree with @PieterB that this is likely to be the case soon if not already done. But who would have thought that a technical hack that was initially used as a fun way to share frivolous information would come to have this much power? (Of course one major concern is that the huge range of obnoxious/inflammatory/insulting tweets from POTUS even without hacking does make it hard to tell the difference.)
@Theo:
Nobody. Nobody did. And it’s power on many levels. I dismissed Twitter at first because I realised telling people about my cat’s antics is fairly narcissistic. But then it turned out that being narcissistic makes you feel awesome even if you’re just posting nearly identical pictures of one cat, which is pretty much what I do.
Somehow all these waves of narcissism turned into a platform that really did help news propagate that otherwise wouldn’t: cops abusing people, governments refusing benefits for stupid reasons, people in power abusing everyone they possibly could.
And then it turned into the opposite. It turned into a vehicle for powerful people to manipulate public opinion. Even when they don’t realise that’s what’s happening.
I should write a bot that filters out all of Twitter apart from the tweets that say “I had these eggs for breakfast, one looks a bit wrong, lol” and then a picture of some eggs. Hey, it’d be like the block bot!
Speaking of going spare, Trump’s Twitter right now is a sight to behold.
HEY! Stop comparing me to Trump! Shit, am I like Trump? Shit.
Tut. “Speaking of” ≠ comparing to.
My favorite use of “going spare” is John Cleese in an early Python sketch – “and there’s the going spare look on the front of his head.”
Derby Council vs. All Blacks Rugby Match / Long John Silver Impersonators vs. Bournemouth Gynecologists.
Sometimes it is, but I didn’t think you were doing that. I probably wouldn’t have used so many exclamation marks if I were serious.
“but that you “get more” friends, more bonding, more community, more connection, more joy, more love. HE WAS SEVEN. If he can get it at that age, then what the fuck is wrong with people like Trump Jr?”
Simple. None of those things have monetary value. Because he doesn’t know the true “value” of friends, bonding, community, connection, joy, and love, then the time and effort required to cultivate those things is time that can be used making money. He certainly would never have learned their value from his father. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.