假新闻带来的Twitter股价“历险记”
Twitter shares spike on fake bid story（513words）

By Hannah Kuchler

------------------------------------------------------

Twitter shares briefly spiked in early New York trading after a fake online news story claimed the messaging company had received an offer valuing it at $31bn.

Shares in the group leapt by as much as 8 per cent when traders reacted to a story purporting to be from Bloomberg News, but which was actually published on a mocked-up lookalike website.

In the fake report, “people with knowledge of the situation” indicated that the messaging platform was working with bankers to consider the offer, from an unnamed bidder.

However, a spokesperson for Bloomberg News used Twitter to warn that the story was fake. A Twitter spokesperson also referred investors to the Bloomberg statement.

Twitter is the latest company to fall victim to the ease and speed at which fake information can travel around the internet — spread either by those seeking a quick financial gain or pranksters.

The Twitter news story carried a ‘Bloomberg. market” web address rather than the official site’s ‘Bloomberg.com’, but was linked to a homepage showing the same stories as the genuine Bloomberg site. Only some of the links on the lookalike homepage were functional, however.

The story did not appear on the Bloomberg terminal news stream, which many traders rely on for market-moving news.

Twitter’s share price fell back roughly to where it had been before the fake story was published, still up 3 per cent on the day at $37.

Twitter has been the subject of speculation about a possible takeover bid since Dick Costolo, the former chief executive, announced his resignation last month.

Many commentators — as referenced by those “quoted” in the fake story — have suggested Google could buy the company, which is now being led by co-founder and former chief executive Jack Dorsey on a temporary basis.

The messaging platform previously suffered a swing in its stock price when its earnings were published earlier than planned in April. The stock fell by as much as 26 per cent — shaving more than $6bn from the group’s market capitalisation — when the earnings report was released ahead of schedule on a platform owned by Nasdaq but scraped by Selerity, a data-gathering company that searches for market-moving news.

At the time, MrCostolo, who was still leading the company, said it was “not particularly fortuitous timing” given Twitter’s results would have disappointed the market even if they had been released on time. Nasdaqapologised for the “operational” error.

Other companies have also been recent victims of misinformation about fake bids. Shares in cosmetics company Avon surged 20 per cent in May when a bid was announced in a seemingly plausible US Securities and Exchange Commission filing by an unknown private equity firm called PTG Capital. PTG is now being sued by the SEC, which claims it made the fake bid as part of a “stock manipulation scheme”.

Earlier this year, a fake press release claimed Carlo Messina, chief executive of IntesaSanpaolo, the Italian bank, had admitted to manipulating the accounts and resigned. Similarly, a fake press notice last year claimed there had been an accounting scandal at outsourcing company G4S.