Imagine if every celebrity you knew in New York suddenly started tweeting about some kind of massive rioting.

Imagine if every verified account related to finance started tweeting “cash out your accounts NOW.”

You could easily, easily cause some pretty massive panic.

TWTR is a largeish company. I have no evidence but presume it is overwhelmingly likely that their scale a) makes getting inside the head of every employee is impossible and b) fosters the right conditions for a healthy number of little agenda-ized splinter cells with various passionate motivations and whatnot.

Besides public state and company size, Twitter is also new media. And all media is information warfare. (Hmm, that sounds a bit strong, especially considering the toxicity that is the platform itself; I mean the term generically speaking.)

Weren't there cases of foreign spies discovered in Twitter ranks, or was that some other company?

Yes, it was Twitter, and and the spies were working on behalf of Saudi Arabia: <a href=“https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/former-twit... Twitter employees charged with spying for Saudi Arabia by digging into the accounts of kingdom critics</a>

It was twitter. But that's largely moot -- there are almost certainly spy-espionage types in a lot of large tech companies. Mostly for siphoning off tech secrets, but I'm sure having someone with root access to some $SYSTEM is useful for political purposes too.

If I were a state actor, I would compromise the accounts of personalities that POTUS follows towards the end of Hannity on a day meaningful to my state.

Most of the adults are asleep and there are any number of things you could write to trigger some sort of shitstorm from POTUS.

Are you really asking that? Trump announces most of his policies live on twitter, can easily announce something that would have a huge influence on the stock market. Multiple examples of companies, Elon Musk, etc doing major announcements on twitter.

Yeah, this hack is a wakeup call. It could have been so much worse. Next time it probably will be.