@AP: Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured.
That was the tweet #shouted around the world today and tweeted about in heated online exchanges.
People want to now how could the @AP Twitter feed get hacked? Did somebody really bomb @whitehouse? Is @BarackObama okay?
Within a second it had 2,111 retweets, and the stock market too a sharp dive dropping 100 points.
Incidents like this reveal the importance of social media information feeds. They show how quickly important or false information can go viral, and that these short messages have a real impact.
Thankfully the error was noticed right away, @AP suspended its news account explaining that the attack “came after hackers made repeated attempts to steal the passwords of AP journalists,” and White House press secretary Jay Carney reaffirmed to reporters that “The President is fine.” Had the miscommunication gone on much longer it could have caused major upset not only in our own stock market, but around the world.
So what do we learn from this? Words count, even when they only add up to 140 characters. And, terror can come in a variety of forms.
People often downgrade Social Media to a pass-time, or laugh at the thought of a tweet sometimes referred to by those who mock twitter as a “twit.” As some of our most widely quoted historical figures have pointed out, keeping the message succinct is more difficult and often more powerful. Abraham Lincoln wrote at the end of a letter, “I'm sorry I wrote such a long letter. I did not have the time to write a short one.” Neitzsche, “It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.”
The value of key messaging in direct phrasing has been held in high regard through time, but now we have a widely used communication tool forcing us to deliver and often without the forethought that our forefathers gave the written word.
Twitter, may sound silly and insignificant, but as we almost learned the hard way today a little tweet can pack a punch. When used correctly, 140 characters can be significant. When abused, can cause harm.
I consider this an social media wake up call. Social media is fast, and online newspapers, television and more and more news sources are trying to react just as fast. That instantaneous news feed is how a hack @AP became viral news, threw the stock market off, and its correction became the story of the day at every major news organization online.
We should be reminded in this time of fast paced written and verbal gratification, vetting still takes time. Patience is still a virtue. Those who take time to check their facts and report with accuracy are becoming more rare as the competition swallows their efforts to maintain integrity. So, as readers and viewers, we should not blindly accept as fact all we hear and read from news sources. Even with the Boston bombing, the information was changed and corrected over and over again.
Is that bad? Not if we understand news and social media for what it has become. It is a rush to be first. There will be mistakes. No matter how quickly our desire to be fed information is satisfied, fact finding takes time. If we listen and read with a certain amount of objectivity, we protect ourselves from believing all “breaking news,” and give ourselves the time fact finding takes before reacting.
What are your thoughts on this twitter hack? Is it a form of terrorism? What role does our own objectivity play? Please share your comments here.
To learn more about the work I do with Social Media and Public Relations go to AHMediaSolutions.com . Follow us on Facebook/AHMediaSolutions . You can email me directly at abrams@ahmediasolutions.com.
via Examiner National Edition Gadgets & Tech Channel Articles http://www.examiner.com/article/twitter-terror?cid=roadrunner