The great thing about Twitter is that it’s currently the fastest way breaking news is communicated.

The bad thing about Twitter is that it’s currently the fastest way breaking news is communicated.

It’s all fun and games when Twitter kills of celebrities like Bill Cosby every once in awhile, but now he good and bad of Twitter has come to the forefront with recent events like the Boston Bombings and the hacking of AP’s Twitter account. The Boston Bombings had news organizations caring more about beating each other to the punch with Breaking News than getting the story right. And then the hacking of AP’s Twitter account had people thinking for a good minute that there was a real life ‘Olympus Has Fallen’ shit going down.

That single hacked tweet from AP caused a good size drop in the market. The false tweet about President Obama being injured by and explosion at the White House was immediately identified as a false tweet, but it still impacted the markets.

Now how is it that traders were able to quickly see that false tweet and then make trading decisions based on that bad information?

Are traders on Twitter all day??? If so I could probably be a beast at that job, ha!!

It turns out that there are trading applications using sophisticated analytic software that looks for keywords on social media that will kick off automatic trades.

Hmmmm….

So no one could foresee an issue with using social media as a source of information to make trading decisions!

WTH

Wow, needless to say this is kind of dangerous. The market is built on confidence, using social media in that way is reckless IMO. Yes, the market quickly corrected itself as traders recognized the mistake. But what about next time when it not so quickly identified that a news organization’s Twitter account has been hacked? It will be interesting to see the fall out from this incident, will Twitter be required to implement more security?

If there is something to be said, “It’s On Broadway” to step up and say it!!