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Automated News Crawling Evaporates $1.14B
cmd writes "The Wall Street Journal reports that Google News crawled an obscure reprint of an article from 2002 when United Airlines was on the brink of bankruptcy. United Airlines has since recovered but due to a missing dateline, Google News ran the story as today's news. The story was then picked up by other news aggregators and eventually headlined as a news flash on Bloomberg. This triggered automated trading programs to dump UAL, cratering the stock from $12 to $3 and evaporating 1.14 billion dollars (nearly United's total market cap today) in shareholder wealth. The stock recovered within the day to $10 and is now trading at $9.62, a market cap of $300M less than before Google ran the story." The article makes clear that Google's news bot only noticed the old story because it has been voted up in popularity on the site of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel newspaper. The original thought was that stock manipulation may have been behind the incident, but this suspicion seems to be fading.
Google News crawled an obscure reprint...
The story was then picked up by other news aggregators...
This triggered automated trading programs...
Is there even a live person at the wheel anymore? Or is SkyNet just fucking with us now?
Never approach a vast undertaking with a half-vast plan.
Who's responsibility though? Should Google have people fact check every news story their bots pick up before putting it up on the aggregator? Should stock companies put fact checkers between the newsfeeds and their stock sale bots? Should online newspapers have fact checkers on every article they put online?
This does show just how fragile a system can be when there is a strong disincentive to going second or third on tasks that one would normally think you should have human interaction.
I read the internet for the articles.
I'm curious about the trading bots. Were the trading bots dumping the stock in 2002? So, if this story were *current* would the bots have simply destroyed UA?
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
How and why would a 5-year old story about bankruptcy suddenly get "voted up" in at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel so that news aggregators (and google-bot) would pick it up? Sounds very suspicious to me.
So are you telling me that I could set up a "click-bot" to vote up old-news and make myself rich in the ensuing mayhem?
Another point that no one seems to be picking up on is the problem of a lot of news sites neglecting to include a dateline on their stories. I've run in to this a number of times, and it makes it difficult to determine the relevance of a given story. It's a very simple thing to include the date the story was published, but a lot of sites don't seem to bother.
I don't care why you're posting AC
When a blip at a local Florida newspaper can combine with a trivial bug to destroy a major American airline in a morning, the economy and the "reporting" that the economy depends on is revealed to be a giant joke.
This episode was remarkable because it was huge, fast, and concentrated in a single high profile corporation. But how much of this broken system's smaller problems go "unnoticed"? Unnoticed as problems, at least, but showing up in all kinds of market valuations and economic decisions based on them that are all built on a landscape of errors, omissions and misunderestimations?
How can you trust an economy that makes mistakes like that? Anyone smart would find any alternative that's less crazy and put their money into it.
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make install -not war