Skip to Content

More Reasons to Clean Up Tweets

Stock plunge another reminder of social media’s power – and the need for fact-checking
April 24, 2013

Yesterday saw the most extreme example possible of why rapid crowdsourced corrections of Tweets and other social media (see “Preventing Misinformation From Spreading Through Social Media”) are critically needed– an issue that came to the fore last week as misinformation spread about the Boston bombings.

Yesterday, the Dow plunged about 150 points and then recovered after an Associated Press Twitter account was hacked, with the hackers then posting a false report that the White House had been bombed and President Obama injured.

A little back-of-envelope math: with the total market capitalization of U.S. companies in the ballpark of $18 trillion, yesterday’s event combined with hair-trigger trading algorithms erased $180 billion in value, and the AP’s correction restored it within seven minutes.  

All from one piece of Tweeted misinformation.  Crowdsourcing, described in the piece I wrote yesterday, would probably never be able to act faster than the AP did in getting the truth out.  But the situation is just plain scary.

Keep Reading

Most Popular

Scientists are finding signals of long covid in blood. They could lead to new treatments.

Faults in a certain part of the immune system might be at the root of some long covid cases, new research suggests.

Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows exactly why.

And that's a problem. Figuring it out is one of the biggest scientific puzzles of our time and a crucial step towards controlling more powerful future models.

OpenAI teases an amazing new generative video model called Sora

The firm is sharing Sora with a small group of safety testers but the rest of us will have to wait to learn more.

Google’s Gemini is now in everything. Here’s how you can try it out.

Gmail, Docs, and more will now come with Gemini baked in. But Europeans will have to wait before they can download the app.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.