In an age of digital falsehoods, the hacking of a top international news agency’s Twitter account to spread a lie universally was a disaster waiting to happen. And because this involved the name of the US President, the sender could generate shockwaves that made the Dow Jones index shed 150 points as panic gripped investors in the stock market. The reliability of social media in disseminating “hard news” has always been suspect; as it’s invariably someone else’s “secret” that’s being disseminated. As the saying goes, “a lie can go halfway around the world while truth is pulling its boots on”. Truth, indeed, has a hard race to run.
So automated are stock exchanges today that only speed breakers on tumbling indices can perhaps help contain the damage somewhat. With the Boston Marathon attack, the rumour mongers and conspiracy theorists had a field day. While such gossip would hardly affect anyone but a closed group of persons in an earlier era, the speed at which “news” travels these days invests rumours with such credibility as to be explosive in their unintended consequences.
The susceptibility of stock markets is a consequence of extreme levels of automation that make billions and billions of transactions possible in a trading day. So much as a wrong press of a button on a trading computer can cause havoc worldwide, which is the price modern society must pay for total dependence on software programmes. The world is yet to devise ways to cope with the digital explosion.