Stock Market Crashes On False Tweet
Wednesday, April 24th, 2013April 24, 2013
A false tweet from the Associated Press (AP), one of the largest and most trusted news-gathering services in the world, created panic on Wall Street for a brief time yesterday. Computer hackers entered AP’s Twitter account and sent a false message stating that the White House had been bombed and that President Obama was injured. It took AP’s staff almost no time to spot and correct the tweet, but the damage was done. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, an index that tracks prices on the stock exchange for 30 major firms, fell 143 points in a matter of minutes. Such a quick and steep drop in stock prices is sometimes known as a flash crash. The market soon recovered once the truth was known, but the panic pointed to recent problems with the use of social media as a news source.

Twitter users post short messages, called tweets, that must be less than 140 characters long. This image shows a section of World Book's Twitter profile page. A profile page collects and displays a user's recent tweets. (© Twitter)
Twitter accounts have been hacked with greater frequency in 2013, especially accounts belonging to news organizations. In March, a group claiming to be supporters of Syria’s beleaguered President Bashar Assad gained control of Twitter accounts belonging to the United Kingdom news organization, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). On April 15, National Public Radio (NPR) discovered that some of their Twitter accounts had been hacked by the same group, who also claimed responsibility for yesterday’s incident on AP’s Twitter account. Reuters (Thomson Reuters) and al-Jazeera had also been targeted.
Twitter has begun working on a new security system that will prevent hackers from being able to break into an account, even if they have the passwords for that account. That new system has yet to be released. Further, it does not address the issue of how quickly information can be disseminated on social media, whether false or true. The issue there concerns readers believing and reacting to reports so quickly.
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