Earlier today, the Associated Press Twitter account was hacked. Typically Twitter hacking of large organizations are meant to be funny, but this one actually had some impact. The hacker tweeted that there had been two explosions at the White House. The biggest effect of this was actually felt in the stock market, as stocks briefly plummeted. The Dow Jones Industrial average fell more than 150 points before it quickly recovered.
If anyone doubted the impact of Twitter before, it would be hard to continue to make that argument now. This event shows just how seriously people take tweets from news organizations and other companies. Although there isn't typically a face attached to tweets that come from media companies, people still consider them as fact until they are told otherwise.
Another issue that stems from this is how easy it is for Twitter accounts to get hacked. Twitter clearly has drastic effects on people, and you'd think these accounts would be a little more secure. Twitter hackings seem to happen far too often.
This makes me think of Hollywood movies that make me afraid that things like this are much more possible than we think. For instance, in Live Free or Die Hard, the villain is able to electronically control the stock market, the traffic signals, our TVs, and more. Luckily for the AP incident, the stock market ended up going back up but a lot of people lost money in what I believe was an evil and malicious thing to do.
ReplyDeleteThis just shows us how far society has come in its' relationship with social media. At first, "it was just something the kids do". It's funny to think it's come from that, to this, where there is such an inherent trust in the little blue check mark that people will believe that there were explosions at the White House. I guess as journalists, we're taught to always be skeptical of what we see; to always look for that second source. But we have to remind ourselves that society is not entirely made up of journalists and that this trust they have in Twitter could turn out to be quite dangerous.
ReplyDeleteHonestly, I think this says far more about the markets than it does about the AP Twitter Feed. Considering the number of Twitter Feeds that have been hacked in the past, as soon as I saw the AP tweet (with no other outlets reporting it), I questioned it. And on my own Twitter feed, I saw many journalists questioning it as well. How would the AP be the only outlet reporting this?
ReplyDeleteBut I do think it's incredible that the stock market acted so quickly and panicked so much. Considering that the tweet was debunked in a matter of minutes, if not seconds, the fact that the stock market was affected THAT MUCH really shows just how fickle it can be.