Since I haven’t been blogging for a couple of weeks, I lost the opportunity to follow as they were taking place the exposures and coverups of Rep. Anthony Weiner (Jerk–N.Y.). By now, it’s all settled down. There are only two viable theories:
Rep. Weiner indeed tweeted (twitted? twot?) a lewd photograph to a comely young lady who had a crush on him.
As a loyal Democrat, Rep. Weiner is doing all he can to distract the country from a miserable economic climate and multiple foreign policy failures.
Meanwhile, somebody somewhere (why can’t I find these blog posts when I want them?) pointed out why it isn’t a mere prank if somebody hacked into the Weiner twitter feed. If a guy who doesn’t like the Brooklyn putz can create a phony tweet about his manhood, someone with more malevolent motives can make it look like Joe Biden is tweeting, “Bombs hit Mecca in an hour. Stay tuned.” Sure, it’ll be corrected within minutes, but minutes of misinformation can do a lot of damage.
Addendum:Thanks to Mike K. (in Comments) for pointing me to the source of the preceding paragraph:
Imagine, though, that someone had hacked his account and instead of sending photos to a single person had "broadcast" any of the following messages:
“Ran out of TP in b/r 2day, so tore some pgs out of Koran someone had left behind. Take that, al Qaida!!!”
“Horrible, horrible news, my friends. POTUS has lung cancer.”
“F---. Saw an advance copy of 2mrw's unemploy #s. 9.5%”
One can imagine countless other fake messages that, coming from the account of a United States congressman, could easily cause rioting, financial panics, etc. Sure, any such fakes would be corrected within a quarter of an hour, but there might well be real and irreversible damage in those 15 minutes.
Some people, I know, may draw the moral that the world was better off when news and opinion traveled more slowly.
I'm not sure if it was brought up elsewhere, but that Twitter angle was mentioned in yesterday's "Best of the Web" post at the WSJ.
Posted by: Mike K. | Saturday, June 04, 2011 at 06:14 AM