So Much for the Decentralized Internet: A recent Twitter hack probably didn’t scare you. Here’s why it should.

Posted July 26, 2020

External Article: The Atlantic

Digital Media Professor Ian Bogost wrote "So Much for the Decentralized Internet: A recent Twitter hack probably didn’t scare you. Here’s why it should" for The Atlantic, July 26, 2020. 

Excerpt:

The hack makes Twitter look incompetent, and at a bad time; its advertising revenues are falling, and the company is scrambling to respond. It also underscores the impoverished cybersecurity at tech firms, which provide some employees with nearly limitless control over user accounts and data—as many as 1,000 Twitter employees reportedly had access to the internal tools that were compromised. But the stakes are higher, too. Though much smaller than Facebook in terms of its sheer number of users, Twitter is where real-time information gets published online, especially on news and politics, from a small number of power users. That makes the service’s vulnerability particularly worrisome; it has become an infrastructure for live information. 

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