Slashdot

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.

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." [ireport.com] 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.

...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...

This is just in, Microsoft is filling for bankruptcy.

Phew, a chance I just coincidentally bought a shitload of puts [wikipedia.org] on MSFT. Market prediction? Fuck that, it's easier to predict the weather when you know how to make shit start to rain.

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.

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.

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.

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/ [xkcd.org]
*please note that this post itself citizen journalism and the author is subject to the same rant he inflicts upon others.

Fake Steve Jobs' writer had a real heart attack?

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 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.

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.

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.

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.