Even after dozens of high profile accounts were hacked many were still commenting that they didn't think it was possible for it to be a twitter vulnerability, but rather individual accounts being compromised or a 3rd party. If you only tweeted plausible things about war and corroborated it from multiple accounts at the same time you can reinforce things pretty easily.
Twenty years later, a substantial part of American society is still insisting Moab really was nuked, drives around with "Remember Moab" bumper stickers, and considers the purported continued existence of Moab to be something like a Deep State plot.
> My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.
>Reactions
>Soviet
>By August 14, the recording of Reagan's joke had become world news. On August 15, someone who the National Security Agency described to US Representative Michael D. Barnes as "a wayward operator in the Soviet Far Eastern command" sent a coded message from Vladivostok that said, in part, "We now embark on military action against the U.S. forces." Japanese and US intelligence decoded the message and raised the alert state in that part of the world; Soviet naval vessels in the North Pacific, on the other hand, contacted Vladivostok in confusion. The US never saw any evidence of Soviet attack preparations, and the alert status as promulgated by Vladivostok was canceled within 30 minutes.[3]
>Initially, on August 13, the deputy minister of Soviet foreign affairs (Valentin Kamenev) told reporters, "I have nothing to say."[5] By the next day, though, President Reagan's leaked comments were denounced by the Soviet government, Pravda, Izvestia, and TASS as "unprecedentedly hostile," as evidence of the United States' insincerity at trying to improve Soviet Union–United States relations, and as abuse of the office of the president. "Western diplomats" described the Soviet response as over-the-top, suggesting it was an effort to give themselves more collateral at the negotiating table with the US.[7] US officials were compelled to mollify the Soviet Union and assure the United States' Cold War adversary that "Reagan’s offhand remark did not reflect White House policies or U.S. military intentions."[8]
http://www.msnbc.com/transcripts/rachel-maddow-show/2016-12-...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/14/ronald-reagan-...
https://www.politico.com/story/2010/08/reagan-jokes-about-bo...
Audio and news coverage:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFCABnWlN8E
Bonzo Goes To Washington - B-B-B Bombing In 5 Minutes (Jerry Harrison, Bootsy Collins)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0k4TNtUZnM4
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Minutes_(Bonzo_Goes_to_Wa...
Conspiracy nuts don't need much to set them off, see 'pizzagate'.
Only few people have Twitter accounts, it's a walled garden. Almost nobody cares what people shout in 140 chars, and likewise nobody cares about people streaming video on Twitch or YouTube in 20 min, what could be written publicly and read in 10 seconds.
With tensions already high and military maneuvers are beeing held closes to each other ... such a twitter comment for sure would have had an effect.
No one would have pushed any red button because of that, but fighter jets on both sides would have been put on alarm and in the air and close to each other(as well as submarines, warships, tanks on the border..) , with a high chance of clashes. Which could have increased the escalation to the point, that someone would feel forced to put the red button.
It's lucky that those kinds of things never go wron...
"On 26 September 1983, the nuclear early-warning system of the Soviet Union reported the launch of multiple intercontinental ballistic missiles from bases in the United States."
...oh.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...
Military is not _exactly_ ran-out-of-diazepam Dave with his hunting rifle and tinfoil hat.
In the meanwhile Trump would appear after some minutes on TV, youtube, and whatever other channel they have around, proofing that he is not sending the tweets, while twitter would do their stuff.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_close_calls
>Get Trump's account...
Tweets from Stable Genius are now just grist for a media-industrial complex of outrage.
Get Trump's account, and tweet something like, "I've ordered a NUCLEAR STRIKE on China! The missiles are already in the air. The DEEP STATE is trying to take me out. They will try to silence me and delete these tweets and use deep fakes to say this was a hoax! The storm is here, Q is real, it's time to take up arms and kill democrats."
Then continue tweeting escalating things over the next half hour (since apparently the hackers couldn't be stopped for a while).