Slashdot Mirror
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."
The stock manipulation possibilities here are pretty big, as is the lawsuit potential.
Hell? Even 4chan and Slashdot are pretty clear about who owns the comments and the veracity of the comments.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
People with the burden and responsibility of thinking for theirselves will be able to assess the risks of trusting an unknown information source just fine. New filters have already been created to make the unknown sources trustable. I don't understand why their is an investigation. Now the story has publicity people can assess the risks more correctly. No need for the law to get involved.
How could you possibly allow just anybody to post just anything under your [CNN] label unless you have blazing billboards that say
Which part of "CNN's unverified citizen journalism site" was unclear?
Okay, so I have to see for myself...
The site currently is titled "Unedited. Unfiltered. News." but it really doesn't mention that it is "citizen journalism." It looks like a cross between Digg/Slashdot and CNN. SO I guess someone could be confused. But I bet a big "THIS IS NOT NEWS I JUST MADE IT UP OMG!!" would not have helped Apple's stock that day.
Wait until Apple's (liti)gators surface - CNN will wish that 'besmirched' was the extent of the damage.
...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?
If I recall even the article writer wasn't sure it was true and said as much. It's typical of the stock market to rise and fall on the possibility of something happening. I'm surprised Apple's stock isn't in the toilet already -- they must think Steve Jobs is immortal...
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.
This is just in, Microsoft is filling for bankruptcy.
Phew, a chance I just coincidentally bought a shitload of puts on MSFT. Market prediction? Fuck that, it's easier to predict the weather when you know how to make shit start to rain.
You just got troll'd!
So this, like the previous wikipedia story basically hinge on the fact that people -- who should really know much better -- are believing stuff they read on the internet from dubious sources. (anything on Wikipedia is likely to be dubious at least to some degree)
You believe stuff you read on the internet, you get burned, quel surprise?
It ain't karma, it's just stupidity. It is admittedly disturbing -- and yet unsurprising considering recent world financial events -- that the stupidity in question in this case involves people who work in the stock market.
As one of a group who received a C&D from a game company over a CLEARLY labelled April Fool's Day joke about a decade back, on a hobby site where we REALLY weren't monitoring who our traffic was (thinking "Us and all of our NO readers"). Turns out the site had become a news dissemination portal for various game retailers, and when they viewed the joke page, they panicked before actually reading the WHOLE page and called the game company up to freak out at.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
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."
Nice, you successfully called Wikipedia a hoax and a prank without actually saying it. Like anything else, if you trust the material on Wikipedia to be true, you're going to get burned eventually. I for one use it as a starting point if I really need to research something, but never as a source itself.
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.
really? you should watch fox more
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
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 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.
So if you stumbled on some random "news" site on the net you'd automatically assume it was verified news? That sounds pretty naive to me. Do you assume everything you read on Slashdot is verified by the editors? iReport.com makes no claim that the stories are verified and the connection to CNN is fairly subtle (a small faint "powered by CNN" logo at the bottom and an ad stating that iReport stories had been used on CNN). I don't see any reason to assume that the stories on that site are verified. The "about" page, which seems the obvious place to go to find out what verification is done clearly states up front that it is unverified:
The views and content on this site are solely those of the iReport.com contributors. CNN makes no guarantees about the content or the coverage on iReport.com!
it besmirks you, then?
Fake Steve Jobs' writer had a real heart attack?
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Online bullshit hurt a company that trades stocks based on bullshit. Big fucking deal. Apple, like many other companies that are traded publicly depend on bullshit news to drive their stock value up. I'll simply chalk this one up for the good guys, because it hurt Apple's stock value. If there is one lesson that we all need to learn... Its that an economy that runs on bullshit, is wrong and will fail in time. And that is why our government is handing out 840 billion dollars in corporate. We run on bullshit, we legislate based on bullshit... the entire thing is one big Wizard Of Oz scenario. Its all a giant pile of shit behind the curtain. Fuck truth... bet on bullshit to win.
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
IANAL.
Everyone seems to be missing the point.
Reporting an unsubstantiated rumor about someone and subsequently causing the stock to tank is not criminal, and probably not actionable (civil lawsuit) either.
What the SEC will be investigating is whether the person who created, propagated, or published this rumor stood to profit from it.
Investigating this possibility is well within the responsibilities of the SEC.
It's up to the actual traders to verify unsubstantiated statements such as this before taking any action.
This is silly, in any case. If Apple is so dependent on the health of one person, they have bigger problems than the antics of a few journalists.
What are they going to do when Jobs finally does pop his clogs? Sooner or later, that is going to happen, and they need to think about that now rather than later.
I think the main takeaway from all this nonsense, aside from stupidity on Wall Street for believing anything and everything, is how frighteningly Apple's fortunes are tightly bound to Steve Jobs specifically.
Bill Gates slowly receded from the limelight at Microsoft, and allowed Ballmer and others to grow into their roles the market's mind. Jobs hasn't really done this yet at Apple. Apple has a few shining lights, but the top of the (Apple) tree is still very clearly The Steve.
{ - Generic Guy - }
We get the evidence of this over and over. Information of any kind; speculation; fear; panic; This is no way to base an economy.
We are off of the gold standard -- something that wouldn't fluctuate so badly as this. Not saying whether or not going off the gold standard was a bad idea, I just see that basing the US economy on this is just bad. Money is created and destroyed out of thin air. This is a voodoo magic market and economy. 700 billion won't fix this problem. What it will do is enable people to keep on doing what they did that allows this sort of thing to happen.
The person who did this is an old journalist and someone who's had problems with stock market advice/manipulation before.
Please don't parrot old media bullshit about this. The problem is not citizen journalism, the problem is that so many people trust the frauds who people old media itself.
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
Face it, the stock market is gambling. You are gambling with your money, betting that the multitude of variables that could come together to clusterfuck your investments don't do that and you get some kind of marginal gain.
Caveat emptor, future stock buyer, caveat emptor.
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
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."
Apple's stock price went vertical, losing 9% before Apple stepped in and denied the rumor
Apple stock has been declining for several months now from around $180/share in May. There was nothing unusual in Friday's price movement when compared to the previous two trading days. On Oct 3rd AAPL traded between $98.20 and $106.40 per share, with a daily volume of 12.512M shares traded. On Oct 4th the range was between $95.30 and $102.33, with a volume of 12.739M shares, and Friday it traded between 95.43 and 101.23, and the volume was lighter - with only 11.4M shares traded. This is consistent with the downtrend for the previous 5 months. If you want to buy Apple stock at this point, feel free to become a long term investor.
Although it's understandable that Apple would strive to correct rumors about the health of their founder and CEO as soon as possible, these rumors were NOT the cause of the long term down-trend in Apple stock since May's highs, nor were they the cause of volatility that is completely in line with today's market conditions - especially when you compare the price movement in the stock with Friday's S&P 500 index, they line up almost perfectly with the general sell-off in the whole market that happened immediately after the vote on the financial relief package. People tend to buy the rumor and sell the news. This is nothing special.
I'm sure a handful of bloggers would love to think that they can move the entire stock market, or even a single highly traded stock, so easily, however we traders quickly learn that the market is smarter than all of us, and as the US government is about to find out, it also has more money than any of us, no matter how rich we are.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
But when Matt Drudge does it it's called 'new journalism'. Still bullshit though.
Rule #1: Everyone is bullshitting you, everyone lies all the time for their own advantage.
Rule #2: The internet makes rule #1 more efficient.
Oh really? Other than the book reviews and journal postings you mentioned - which qualifies Slashdot as a successful blog - I haven't seen much in the way of original articles since Katz left. Even what he did was more along the lines of an opinion piece. Not what I would call "news."
I see, we're getting caught up in words.
If Google gathers together news articles produced by other sources, and presents them as a collection of news from top agencies, they are an aggregator. I don't really consider them a "news site," because they don't (as far as I know) employ reporters who go out and gather news. They don't produce original news content. If they put a New York Times story on their front page, it is my impression of the Times' credibility that will determine whether or not I take what is reported as factual.
Well, I think CNN and the Washington Post other sites whose business is to sell eyeballs to advertisers are probably pretty careful about protecting themselves from libel suits, and spend a non-trivial sum of money checking the things they report as facts. They may not always get it right, and we may not always agree that they represent those facts objectively, but their reputation heavily influences the amount they are able to charge people to advertise in the dead-tree versions of their publications.
So yes, I think some sites put a lot more effort in to verifying facts than your average "citizen journalism" blog.
Because the geocities website and random forum put the same resources in to checking the accuracy of what they report as CNN and Reuters? Nice try. Let's compromise with "maintain a healthy skepticism."
True, but I'll put AP, Reuters and even CNN's record up against some random blog any day, because they have earned at least some credibility. So have some blogs, and more will. You make a name for yourself by having a reputation for always being right, because you always check your facts. Get caught running with something you weren't sure of just to get attention and your credibility will be shot. That's what the big news sites have that the random blog doesn't - a reputation worth protecting.
I don't care why you're posting AC
Well, the problem with citizen journalism is that, pretty much by definition, you don't know who's who. It could be
- a concerned citizen who's done his research, but equally it could be
- a traditional journalist trying to get more street cred to his newspaper views (see the story about that guy editing Wikipedia about naked shorting,)
- an idiot talking out the arse,
- a zealot on some holy crusade, and who already found his "Truth" and all that remains is to spread the word to the ignorant masses. And for whom no lies, fallacies, FUD, disinformation or hyperboles are too low to be used in that holy goal. (And not just lonely nerds. Whole think-tanks exist who make propaganda their only mission.)
- a paranoid schizophrenic who takes his own imagination for reality (and I mean paranoid schizophrenia as in, the medical meaning: the kind that comes with realistic delusions),
- a shill (PR disguised as news, astroturfing and pseudo-word-of-mouth buzz-building are still popular devices),
- someone trying to manipulate another company's stock (own before selling some, or the stock of someone he wants to buy stock in),
- a joker who isn't funny enough to be clear that he's joking (just look on Snopes for some fine examples of joke news which then got taken seriously by too many people. Or I've seen at least one serious article, which linked to a The Onion story as source,)
Etc, etc, etc.
So going, essentially, "yeah, well, but that was one of the _other_ guys, trust us not him" is handwaving, as long as you can't tell who's who. For the outside guy, they all look the same. And they all claim they're the genuine article, and some _others_ are the ones you shouldn't trust.
Even reputation, people linking to it, posts confirming it, etc, are meaningless. For a start, we're in the golden age of sockpuppets. Also, things which are blatantly false for anyone with even a modicum of education, routinely get modded up "Informative" even on Slashdot, and conversely textbook quotes routinely get modded down. Or look at how "pundits" like Dvorak make a living and are read by a ton of people as great IT information, even though he's the same guy who had a whole article along the lines of, "my idle process in windows is using up 99% of the CPU cycles! That's why my windows is sluggish!"
Journalism reputation (online or old press, equally) is more of a question of saying the things a given crowd wants to hear, than anything even vaguely resembling truth value or quality. Or a matter of sounding like some knowledgeable guy giving a free lecture, even if you don't actually know jack shit about the topic. Again, see half those IT "pundits", but also a good number of posts right here on Slashdot.
Even credentials are routinely faked (see, 14 year old kids posing as some Ph.D.) or bought. Either from some diploma mill, or just finding someone with a Ph.D. title to sign your PR piece. Corporate PR uses the latter kind quite extensively. There'll always be someone who doesn't have much of a good name to lose, and will take your 30 silvers to give science the kiss of death. Even with tongue, if you pay extra.
So who _do_ you trust in a medium where for each 1 genuine citizen journalist, there are 99 fakes?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.