Review: A Cautionary Tale
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 07 25, 2013
The Fifty Megaton Tweet is a cautionary tale. Have you ever seen something amazing on Twitter or Face Book and been about to retweet or repost it when a small internal voice came to you and asked "Is this really true?" and you decided to put off retweeting or reposting until you had confirmation?In The Fifty Megaton Tweet a tweet is posted on Twitter saying that the President of the United States had been assassinated while on a trip to India. Shortly thereafter, there is a video posted on You Tube purporting to show the President's bullet-ridden body lying on the ground. There is a treat from a well- known Congressman that confirms the President's death. Then there is a posting that said that a group of politicians in Washington had made an agreement with the government of North Korea to curtail sanctions once the President was out of office. The combination of tweets and video so overwhelm the communications systems that none of this information can be confirmed or denied with any certainty.Immediately there is rioting in the streets of many major cities, starting in Boston. The gap between rich and poor has become so extreme by this time that the rioting takes the form of class warfare, with the wealthy becoming the targets of the rioter's wrath. The White House is stormed and the Secret Service is barely able to protect the family of the President and the Vice President and his family.Even worse, the commander of military post in South Korea decides to take matters in his own hands and puts in motion a contingency plan to assassinate the dictator of North Korea. This immediately sets of an international conflict involving North Korea and, ultimately, China. The U.S. government begins to consider, literally, the nuclear option.What if the whole thing was put in motion by a hoax? Could such a thing actually happen in real life? The Fifty Megaton Tweet raises a lot of interesting questions and I recommend reading it and thinking about these issues.