The Associated Press Twitter account yesterday was hacked an briefly broadcasted to the world an unprecedented national crisis. “Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured,” tweeted the @AP. The Dow plummeted nearly 100 points following the tweet, briefly losing $100 billion, but quickly recovered after the news was found to be fake. There is a much bigger story nestled in this news other than two-step authentication for Twitter. (The microblog is said to have a working product that they’re frantically testing internally.) A Twitter account, a single tweet, was able to affect the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). In the hyper-connected digital world we live in now, tweets are affecting the stock market in real-time. News is becoming less and less about facts and more and more about breaking what could-be-fact. I don’t know about you, but that kind of a world scares me.
On today’s Live NewsDesk Show with Kristin Feledy (see live stream below) we’ll be hearing from SiliconANGLE Contributing Editor John Casaretto. What does this mean for our news cycle? Does this mean Twitter is the fastest and most effective way of delivering news that currently exists? Have we gotten to the point of ignoring fact-checking for story-breaking?