Can the stock market crash with a chirp? Apparently yes. In the last two days, for example, it has happened twice and at the expense of the unfounded news spread on Twitter were two companies listed on the Nasdaq: the pharmaceutical Sarepta Therapeutics, slumped Wednesday by 9,9% in a minute and information technology Audience Inc, devalued by about the same amount the day before. An update of a few lines on an interesting issue for investors was enough, a few tricks to make what was written credible and the charm of "important" information, the one that makes those who disseminate it believe they are joining an elite circle of “those who know”, did the rest.
The persuasion techniques resemble those used by Spammer to lead Internet users to trap sites. These are a few poor rules to deceive those who read updates on a given topic. The Twitter account that spread the false news regarding Sarepta's biomedical research data, for example, was "@citroenresearc“. A minimum of attention was enough to understand that it could not be the Twitter account of the "Citron Research“, noted company of bearish speculators.
The ill-intentioned then know very well that the chatter on the big ones pharmaceutical multinationals o technological (Audience Inc. provides Apple with software for reducing background noise during telephone conversations) is much loved by social network users. In these areas, the soil is very fertile for growing the desire to participate in the discrediting of companies connected, rightly or not, to unbridled capitalism, which is negative by definition.
Although in the latter two cases, it is real agitation, it is not the first time that social network users have been responsible for spreading hoaxes against companies listed on the Stock Exchange. For example, one can cite the story circulated on the Net about the alleged synthetic hamburgers of McDonald's, the only ones, according to the author of the hoax, never to rot. The news on the mix between was also sensational Coca-Cola and Mentos who allegedly made a Brazilian child's stomach explode. Needless to say, such an event never occurred.
