Tuesday, April 23, 2013

What the TWEET?

Somebody hacked The @AP Twitter account (The Associated Press) and posted a bogus tweet saying the White House had been attacked and Obama had been injured.

Pic of AP tweet from the Wall Street Journal

The stock-market's knee-jerk reaction to the tweet was spectacular.



Screen shot of my iPhone stock market app.
The Dow, which had been at 14698 points (up about a 130 points for the day), fell 127 points into the red within two minutes, and then bounced back just as quickly as it became obvious that the news was false, and a prank. The @AP account has been shut down until they find out who hacked the account and sent the tweet. 

The Wall Street Journal may be calling this a prank, but some of us could call this terrorism.  People lost money.  If you had had a stop-loss in place on a call during this "so called" prank, you would have sold your calls for no financial reason whatsoever.

Unfortunately we place too much importance on social media and we allow social media to have too much influence on our lives.  Network news programs use tweets as news items.
What is this world coming to?  I wonder if this event will even make the network news shows?  Maybe it will... if the Kardashians are having a slow day.

278.  Feeling like writing again
279.  Struggling with finding my voice and being ok with that
280.  Struggling with my job and whether or not to stay and being ok with that
281.  Watching my son succeed in his independence
282.  Ten days until my vacation
283.  Doing some soul searching and being ok with what I'm finding.  Even if it's something I have to change

4 comments:

  1. I was blissfully ignorant of all this. What a crazy, crazy world!

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  2. The fake tweet happened at 1:07 p.m. EST. I hope this makes the evening news. I hope the pundits believe this is news the American people want to know about. Thanks for sticking by me during my silent time. :)

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  3. Wow. I didn't know of this either.

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  4. this is the first i had heard of this....
    hope they find the hacker and string them up...
    just saying...

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