Just found out how powerful social media really is

The Asocciated Press Twitter account was hacked a couple of minutes ago and the hacker(s) tweeted that there was a White House explosion and Obama was hurt. This tweet, within minutes, scared investors and the stock market dropped over 150 points, which is considered a huge drop, especially in a couple of minutes. I am currently trading currencies (forex) and I was almost wiped out because of this market scare. The markets recovered quickly, but it just goes to show how powerful social media is nowadays. I'm sure that people lost millions, possibly tens of millions, in just a few seconds.

Blackhat Twist: Be the hacker. Get investors. Hit the tweet button. Mad cash.

what i didnt hear that

I'm actually going long on the USD/JPY and it dropped from 99.3xx to 98.5xx, which at a 50:1 leverage would've resulted in people losing about 50% of their position in a minute. I almost had a margin call, which basically just means that after my account loses more than 50% of its total value in a single or multiple trades, all my open positions would be automatically closed out. This definitely hit the day traders hard and probably a couple of members on here.

Black.Star said:

Blackhat Twist: Be the hacker. Get investors. Hit the tweet button. Mad cash.

Click to expand...

I was just thinking about that haha. Get a team of hackers to recreate this with the white house's twitter account and double your money in seconds.

The world is connected via social media. When something spreads viral, its spreading far. I had one picture today on my news feed of someone holding a sign up that said "My wife told me if I get 1 million likes, I can get a bunny". I saw that he was at 1,053,000 likes! So I guess he got his bunny, who knows. But the moral of this statement is just the fact of how powerful social media can be.

jakeparker said:

The world is connected via social media. When something spreads viral, its spreading far. I had one picture today on my news feed of someone holding a sign up that said "My wife told me if I get 1 million likes, I can get a bunny". I saw that he was at 1,053,000 likes! So I guess he got his bunny, who knows. But the moral of this statement is just the fact of how powerful social media can be.

Click to expand...

I think that it's a great age that we live in; ideas can be spread in seconds and those who can advantage of this can capitalize on these ideas very quickly. Viral pictures on facebook can build fanpages quickly and even if you were able to monitize a tiny fraction of those 1m+ likes, you made a small fortune in a couple of days.

If it wasn't for true TV media broadcasting, we would all be getting pranked like this through social media everyday,