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Jobs Rumor Debacle Besmirches Citizen Journalism
On Friday someone posted a false rumor that Steve Jobs had suffered a heart attack on CNN's unverified citizen journalism site, iReport. Apple's stock price went vertical, losing 9% before Apple stepped in and denied the rumor; the stock then recovered most of its loss. The SEC is investigating. PCWorld looks at the hit taken by citizen journalism as a result of this incident. "[The] increasingly blurred line between journalism and rumor is a serious concern for Al Tompkins, the broadcast/online group leader at The Poynter Institute — a specialized school for journalists of all media forms. 'How could you possibly allow just anybody to post just anything under your [CNN] label unless you have blazing billboards that say, "None of this has been verified, we've not looked at any of this, we have no idea if this is true"?' he asks."
...but with the financial system. maybe we should be looking instead at how vast sums of money can be moved into and out of a company in seconds? episodes like this have shown the instability of the share market, and the craziness of the finance market. everything is built upon smoke and mirrors - performance counts for little, while perception, lies and marketing rule the day
and why are the traders who sold off their shares paying attention to unverified sources like ireport? well, probably because the trader next to them did; it's all got to a point of 'following the herd' rather than making decisions based on financial judgement.
90% of trades based on speculation? what do you expect?
The problem isn't that's unedited unfiltered, that just means there may be naughty words and curses in it. It should be "unfiltered and unverified" news. A quick look @ the website, even scrolling down, shows no disclaimer that this unverified. Breaking news is fine, so I understand not wanting to take the time to verify, but there should be a disclaimer that it's unverified. And until this story on here, I never heard of it. So I may have taken something on there for fact had I stumbled on it by accident or via google search.
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
Please, the presumption that this only happens because of "citizen" journalists is comical in face of all the intentional distortions, spin, bias, poor fact checking, and general incompetence of the general media.
Most columnists have such big axes to grind that that's all they are... a walking talking cause. Most of the reporters are both sloppy and lazy. Most of the anchors and tv personalities are just talking heads... mindless twits with million dollar smiles and/or the ability to spin like a quasar.
Citizen journalists are if anything worse however unlike regular journalists they've not given the benefit of the doubt on issues. When they report something we need verification. That is the value of citizen journalists. They're good because we don't trust them. If we could all be as dubious of regular journalists then they'd have some value. But we do trust them... and that leaves us open to deceit.
Seriously, investors knock 10% off the value of Apple's stock because somebody anonymously posted a rumor on the internet and this is "citizen journalism"'s fault? Bullshit. Is everybody who falls for a 419 scam also a black eye for citizen journalism? By these standards, every time a political campaign inserts a letter to the editor under a false name, the very foundations of the mainstream media are called into question. This is idiocy.
Ok people, I know that those of you who get to write for the real media want this to be important, it isn't, suck it up. Anyway, repeat after me: "Anybody can say anything on the internet, this doesn't make it true."
...wouldn't intentionally tanking the stock of a company via unsubstantiated rumor be criminal?
It better not be. It's up to the actual traders to verify unsubstantiated statements such as this before taking any action. Restrictions on speech have already gone way too far.
What?
Guys, this is not new.
Some people on /b/ spent an hour early Friday morning discussing how they could make up a rumor that people were likely to believe, just for the lulz. Eventually, and basically by accident, someone decided that a Steve Jobs rumor would work just fine. He posted a fake but almost plausible story on iReport and digg ("I just saw paramedics take Steve Jobs away, he had a heart attack!") and got hundreds or thousands of /b/ users to Digg it.
I saw this conversation happening live. It's pretty cool that tens of thousands of random anonymous people can change world markets, huh?
The story was obviously fake, and any careful reader of Digg would've immediately noticed the 4chan references in the comments. Naturally there were no careful readers; blogs which have never been very good about checking their sources reported the joke as a real rumor, and small parts of the "real media" started to pick up the story.
The beleaguered stock hit its 52-week low on Friday, although it regained some value after Apple issued an official denial. The SEC has demanded (and received) docs from CNN on the /b/tard who submitted the iReport story.
There's nothing new here, guys. Real media have always known that you need to trust your sources, and if the free market and the "new media" blogs can't figure that out, they're dumber than we give them credit for.
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
The Bloomberg/Google slipup a while back also caused large-scale losses, in that instance to United Airlines. Bloomberg actually stated that it does not verify the accuracy of news from other sources. Basically, it trusted Google to do the verification.
This is actually the way it should be. Using automated trading and real-time news to speculate on the stock market should, on average, lose you money. It gives negative inducement to speculation. Investments need to be chosen based on real data, and concrete value. Not based on what you think others will do.
If this is a legitimate case of attempted manpulation, the SEC can do its job. If not, it's a small loss that should have been factored into any risk calculations when the investors decided to trade like this.
Three rights make a left. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly.
How does anyone who didn't panic and sell during the temporary low spot actually lose any money?
Welcome, Internet. You take every baboon, idiot, and moron and give them the opportunity to be heard at the same level of volume as every other individual out there. You then take a news agency, wanting to capitalize on not having to pay stringers constantly, and provide said speech free to the world.
I laugh.
I spent 5 years in college doing photojournalism, 4 years in High school, and 2 years in middle school- all with a camera plastered to my hip and face. My life was defined in photos of other people. Now out, I look forth and see every person with a cell phone camera capturing daily drivel and spouting it off as 'news'. News is immediate and important based on locality- ie, it's important if you shoot it because it's important to you- the rest of the world (more likely than not) just doesn't give a shit. However- and here is where the internet and CNN step in- you now have a distribution model to *make* it important.
So the health of Steve Jobs is suspect- we all know that. Apple hid it from the world so the stock price wouldn't tank. Apple has done it to itself by not being candid in the past- and has reinforced the notion that if the almighty master suffers the company will suffer. Had they suffered this price dump in the past the future wouldn't revolve around every little sniffle.
Investigate all you want- Even if the stock was manipulated many people took profit at the news- because they recognized the inherit fear that Apple has now linked itself to Steve Job's life.
Thus, I give you my opinion on citizen journalism: http://xkcd.org/481/
*please note that this post itself citizen journalism and the author is subject to the same rant he inflicts upon others.
It would have been easy enough to start the rumor, wait for the stock to dive, then buy some. There was no need to sell short in this case, because the rumor starter could be pretty sure the stock would recover when it was revealed to be false.
BUT, the person who started the rumor only gets in trouble if he or she DID buy Apple stock when it fell. Otherwise it's just CNN being irresponsible by letting random, anonymous strangers post "news" and everyone else being idiots for believing it.
it besmirks you, then?
I firmly believe that this type of event is in the long term best interest of all parties.
Even before the proliferation of untrusted individual reporting becoming trusted (read: blogs) the large news agencies have been blindly trusted by nearly everyone. Everyone is shocked when it's revealed that the reports they read in their papers were outright wrong, or even lies.
Everything we can do to impact every day Joe in a way that gets them thinking critically about news reports will benefit us in the long run. We will, hopefully, become less impacted by propaganda compaigns, as well as less likely to react to news/media reports irrationally and impulsively.
Of course, I admit that this is some kind of massive wishful thinking but, man... wouldn't it be nice to see some random jerk on the street see a newspaper and murmer "I wonder if that's true." instead of "OMG PONIES!?"
I read the script, and I think it would help my character's motivation if he was on fire. -Bender
Slashdot isn't a "news site." Slashdot simply links to stories at other sites and gives it's users a forum to discuss them. I have no expectation that Slashdot will take any steps to verify the facts in them. I still need to consider the source of the story Slashdot links to, any evidence provided to back up the story's claims, and my good 'ol bullshit detector. Having something posted on Slashdot isn't a seal of accuracy.
I don't care why you're posting AC
Maybe, instead of worrying about rumors on these socnet "news" sites, these "journalistic watchdogs" might want to spend a little time thinking about the way mainstream journalism let down a country of more than 300 million by completely missing the fact that a presidential administration started a fucking war based upon nothing but lies and misdirection. Instead of jumping on the wagon and cheerleading this horrible rush to war, they might have checked a few facts themselves before going to print, day after day, week after week, month after month for more than two years.
Yes, it's a horrible thing that Apple's stock price went down by 9 percent (my guess is it will have gained it back by the time the rumor is straightened out). But more than 4,000 American military and a few hundred thousand Iraqi civilians lost their fucking lives thanks to the so-called "real journalists" blowing the biggest story of this century (so far).
Excuse me if I don't get too excited if some nervous bettors lost some money because they listened to an unsourced rumor in a week when the rest of the stock market was going into the tank, too.
Anyway, you'd think that the fact that Steve Jobs has AIDS would be a bigger deal than a heart attack, anyway.
You are welcome on my lawn.
anyone here ever use the iReport website? i just checked it out expecting it to be like digg or kuro5hin, but the front page "articles" were just vacation photos with descriptions like:
scrolling down i did find some 2-3 paragraph submissions which were editorializing more than reporting on news. and while users are allowed to vote on submissions (it uses a 5 star rating system like youtube), there doesn't seem to be any kind of collaborative filtering system to speak of. even the "highest rated" section only has articles with 10 votes or less.
quite honestly, the demographic of this site seems to be a mix of typical forum trolls mostly posting poorly photoshopped images attempting to be funny, technologically clueless grandmas and grampas who think they're on flickr, and the occasional armchair politician or college pseuodointellectual. there appears to be very little quality control on this site. i mean, the user submissions aren't quite as bad as youtube comments, but it stands in stark contrast to the user-generated content of sites like Wikipedia, E2, Kuro5hin, and even Slashdot.
IMO the problem is not just their poor implementation of collaborative filtering/peer moderation, but also due to companies like CNN/IGN/Sony/etc. not knowing how to seed an online community. quality online communities need to grow in an organic fashion similar to social/cultural movements. sites like E2 or Slashdot start as niche cultures similar to a grassroots movement. they're usually a small tightly knit group of passionate people who are dedicated to the growth and upkeep of the site. these starting members shape the culture of the site and determine the direction of the site's growth. once a viable community has been seeded and a unique subculture established, it will attract new like-spirited members and grow into a larger community.
how CNN has created iReport.com is analogous to astroturfing. rather than a passionate web developer (or group of web developers) coming up with an innovative idea for a new social web app that is fostered and gradually grown into a large online community over the span of a few years, CNN's site was likely conceived of in a board meeting by some marketing consultant to help the company gain street cred or tap into the Web 2.0 craze. in any case, it was created by people who are out of touch with the internet community at large, and who were concerned mainly with increasing CNN's stock value rather than establishing a quality online community.
you can't just create an online community overnight. you can try by spending a ton of money advertising the site. but what you'll end up with is something like iReport. there's no real sense of community, and the signal to noise ratio is incredibly low. it's really no surprise that the quality of the submissions is extremely poor. i don't see how anyone can call the content generated on that site "reporting."
Yeah, but it was unlikely it was someone shorting Apple, isn't it? The SEC has clamped down on selling short right now, right? It's more likely that it was just someone screwing around. As long as they aren't an investor or trader, it's hard to see how they'd actually get in any trouble, any more than the guy who showed up on the BBC supposedly representing DuPont and claiming they were setting up a compensation fund for the people and families of the injured and killed from the Bhopal disaster. It was pretty funny - it put DuPont in the position of having to deny they were going to help people. (DuPont bought Union Carbide a number of years ago). Sure, this stuff can have real consequences, but it's not hard to claim you were just being funny if you have no financial ties.
The stock market is constantly looking for reasons to act irrationally
The market moves based on rational people forecasting when others will act irrationally. Given that this second-order phenomenon is always reasonably likely, this happens more or less continuously. By rational people. Yep.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear