State declarations must not be made via Twitter

In the wee hours of Sunday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Twitter account was hacked and a false tweet sent out claiming that “India has officially adopted Bitcoin as a legal tender”. The government, it said, “has officially bought 500 BTC and is distributing them to all residents of the country”. It was almost an hour later that the Prime Minister’s Office used the micro-blog platform to inform us that Modi’s handle was “very briefly compromised”. This is the second time in a bit over a year that his Twitter account has been hacked. Last September, a handle linked to his personal website had tweeted appeals for donations in cryptocurrency to the Prime Minister’s covid relief fund. Like on that occasion, we don’t know if anyone was taken in by Sunday’s fake message. With a crypto policy in the making, the level of disbelief is not easy to guess. But there is no denying the havoc that hackers could wreak by exploiting a glaring vulnerability Twitter hasn’t yet been able to fix. It’s a global problem. Last July, the handles of former US president Barack Obama, rapper Kanye West, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and others got taken over by scamsters offering to double the money of people who sent Bitcoin via a specified link. No matter how incredible such messages sound, the incredulity of all recipients cannot be assumed.

Tweets mistaken for official statements by those in high positions of power could pose a particular menace in the context of a standoff. There is good reason for confidence building measures between nuclear-armed adversaries, for example, to include mechanisms designed to ensure that an error of signal interpretation does not accidentally result in mutually assured destruction. What political leaders say can be of vital importance even otherwise. This is why they should desist from using Twitter to make any policy announcement, restrict themselves to official channels (with assured security) and make this loud and clear to their audiences. For heads of state, especially, this should always have been the protocol, but it was dispensed with by Donald Trump, whose use of a personal account as US president for four years till early 2021 nudged several others down a slippery slope. His tweets on White House policy would often cause consternation and roil markets, as seen in the US trade war with China, and while his handle was later suspended for breaching the usage terms of Twitter, the precedent he set has had ill effects that deserve scrutiny from a risk perspective.

Apart from the threat of hack-ins, there is another reason for an explicit disavowal of Twitter by policymakers who must convey matters of high significance. While follow-up explanations or tweets to promote a policy are fine, news breaks with market-sensitive information should not be available to a private party even for a moment before it goes public. Though instant messages were once a routine expectation on this platform, technical delays do occur and content filters have been put in place, so zero-lag tweets are not a certainty. This has implications that have escaped an overdue debate. After all, the very possibility of a company having privileged access to valuable material should hold up a flag of caution in an era of data arbitrage with big money riding on split-second advantages. To be sure, no such data-leak scandal has arisen so far. But the use of a casual channel for formal notices is a trend that could go badly wrong. It’s time for leaders to ensure Twitter is assigned a safe role.