Recently a hacker took over the twitter account for the Associated Press (AP), creating momentary chaos across the world. The hacker posted a fake message claiming that US President Barack Obama was injured as a result of an explosion in the White House: AP Twitter
Immediately after the fake tweet went live, legacy news feed machines took up this message. This resulted in drastic nosedives of both the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500 before quickly rebounding: Machine in Control
“This is what happens if you don’t incorporated semantic cross referencing in your Machine Readable News (MRN) processing systems” says Bram Stalknecht, CEO of semantic analytics software vendor SemLab. “High frequency traders relying on social media only, without enhanced noise filtering and cross referencing, risk taking decisions based on wrong news”.