Social media can be both - a killer's knife or a surgeon's scalpel

By Ravi M Khanna

The power of social media is amazing indeed. Just within a span of 10 days in April, we saw the negative power of a false message on Twitter, when a phony tweet triggered a sudden and temporary fall in stock prices at the New York Stock Exchange, as well as the positive outreach of a message on Facebook when it helped track down two brothers who allegedly killed innocent people by exploding bombs at the Boston Marathon.

So it was proved again that both the user who posts messages on social media, and the consumer who reads them, should be very careful. They must realize that it is like a knife which can take away as well as save lives, depending on who is using it - a killer for a crime or a surgeon to operate on someone.

The false message on Twitter that made the stock prices at the New York Stock Exchange tumble for a few surreal minutes was merely 12 words long. It was sent by the hackers as a tweet by the Associated Press falsely reporting “Two Bombs Exploded at the White House and President Obama was Injured”.

That triggered investors to start dumping stocks — eventually unloading more than $130 billions’ worth. Again, thanks to the latest technology, most of the investors weren't human. They were computers, programmed to sell on autopilot as soon as they read a negative news item. In this case the negative words being “Bomb explosions at White House” and “Obama injured”. So the trigger was beyond the control of humans, like a scary scene from a science fiction movie.

There are some traders who are already against high speed computerized trading on the stock market. They believe such knee jerk reactions are not possible if humans are involved. Markets quickly recovered, but the episode raised some basic questions about the relationship between social media and the markets. Experts said such glitches are inevitable because such computer programmes just count the number of negative and positive words in a particular tweet, without any filter. They say such computer trading programmes are increasingly written to read, and react to, news from social media outlets such as Twitter.

Some outfits that sell news feeds that computers can read don’t include Twitter in their feeds, saying that there is too much useless “clutter and noise" in the tweets. They rightly contend that there is too little context in the tweets because of the 140-character limit.

The seriousness of the danger was highlighted when a group calling itself the Syrian Electronic Army claimed responsibility on its own Twitter feed for the AP hack. The group supports President Bashar al-Assad in the civil war, and has hacked into the Twitter accounts of Reuters News, BBC and CBS' 60 Minutes.

Meanwhile, the positive impact of the same social media was highlighted when a Facebook message containing just eight words helped clueless investigators who were trying to find out who placed the two bombs near the finish line at the Boston Marathon that killed and maimed several people.

The words (Bag, saw the guy, looked right at me) were written down on Facebook by one of the victims of the Boston bombing, who is now being hailed as a hero. Jeff Bauman had been waiting for his girlfriend to cross the finish line when a man wearing a cap, sunglasses and a black jacket over a hooded sweatshirt looked him in the eyes and dropped a bag at his feet. The words helped crack the biggest terrorism case in the US since 9/11 and confirmed the suspicions of FBI agents scanning videos from the scene. The FBI showed Bauman the images and he was able to pick out the man he had seen.

According to a police official, the investigators could single out two persons, who instead of running away from the bombing scene, were very calm and casual as they walked away from the place. "When bombs blew up, when most people were running away and victims lying on the ground, the two suspects walk away pretty casually,” he said.

The whole episode also proved that social media has built a community within our community and its denizens do not hide when there is a crisis. They come out to help. So, when the FBI released photographs of suspects Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, tip-offs came pouring in immediately, and much of the internet community did its best to help track them down. This became possible because the FBI realized that it could take the help of the internet community, more than the real community, in identifying and tracking down the two suspects. Boston police and the FBI acknowledged that their capture was facilitated by surveillance footage, amateur video and photos on Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites.

A few years ago, this process would have taken hundreds of investigative man-hours. But now, with social media and an active internet community, it is so much faster. That new community only needs to realize its responsibility and the fact that a knife can kill, and also save lives depending on how it is wielded.

(Author/columnist Ravi M. Khanna has covered South Asia for Voice of America from Washington and New Delhi for more than 24 years)