One Tweet, One Terrible Tuesday

BREAKING: TWO EXPLOSIONS IN THE WHITE HOUSE AND BARACK OBAMA IS INJURED

At 1:07 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on Tuesday, April 23, the Associated Press sent the above message out through their Twitter account. Although @AP almost immediately clarified that the Tweet was written by a hacker—somebodywho broke into the account and posted the fake tweet—bythen it has been retweeted(sent by other users) nearly 3,000 times, resulting in a good deal of public panic, and to the surprise of many, a nearly one percent drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Index. In other words, one false tweet caused the largest financial system in the world to momentarily crash. Following the initial tweet, stock markets recovered fairly quickly as news spread just as fast that the message was a fake. How did this happen? How did so many people read, believe, and share this information and do it so quickly? And how were we all duped enough to ripple through the stock market? [url=http://mentalfloss.com/article/50275/7-ways-wecould- tell-ap-tweet-was-fake]Mental Floss’s[/url] ArikaOkrentwent back the next day and reanalyzed the message and found seven ways in which the discerning news reader would have been able to spot the fraud immediately. For example, AP news stories always write the word “Breaking” in all capital letters (i.e., BREAKING). Also, the AP would never refer to the President of the United States as BarackObamawithout his formal title (i.e., President BarackObamaor President Obama). Looking closer, she also noticed that the tweet was not signed by the reporter who crafted it (AP tweets usually include the initials of the reporter), and also the tweet was not sent from the Social Flow media service to which the AP subscribes. Although the markets quickly recovered— indeed they closed the day up 152.29 points (a 1.05 percent gain from the opening mark)— this “flash crash” has many analysts revisiting their computer algorithms and their own people to build more critical thinking barriers into the information processing equation.


Have you ever been “duped” by something that you read online? Share your experience with us. Looking back, what might you have done differently to evaluate the information you found? Can you offer some advice to help others avoid falling into this trap? What if you're not sure if something is real or not? What can/should you do?

I actually have a really great story about this! I got introduced to a website called Reddit a while back and I was trolling around on the subreddit for the New England Patriots. It’s fun to go there because the fans are, half the time, willing to have an actual conversation about football and the other half of the time just willing to blindly argue about whether Tom Brady is innocent or not. Anyway, Reddit is totally anonymous and there was speculation from some guy that said a player named Julian Edelman was about to get suspended for four games because he got caught using performance enhancing drugs. He claimed he had ties with the team. Nobody really believed him at first but then the next day the NFL actually suspended him! It was all over the news and ESPN then the guy told us all that he was going to post another update. Everyone wanted to know who this guy was. ESPN and a few different news stations were trying to figure it out. I got entirely swept up in it because I was hoping this guy could give me some insider information so I could get a leg up in fantasy football. The next day comes and he lets us all have it. He tells us that he didn’t actually know anything, that he isn’t affiliated with the Patriots and that modern journalism is a joke. So this random guy made a major football league look foolish, made the media look ridiculous and made a bunch of football fans, including me, look stupid.

I genuinely don't know what I would do differently. The information came from some random person online and got repeated by major sources. I didn't believe him when he first posted but the response was was would be almost impossible to ignore. What it made me realize was I can't believe everything I hear just about literally anywhere. Now I look for my information from players directly via social media.