Musk’s Twitter: AI image of Pentagon explosion causes the stock market to crash briefly

fake reports
Musk’s verification disaster: AI image of Pentagon explosion goes viral and causes the stock market to crash briefly

What else is there to believe? This question is becoming increasingly difficult to answer due to social media and artificial intelligence. Both problems just came together in a viral fake. With extreme consequences.

Two developments have made it increasingly difficult to verify the authenticity of messages. Social media ensured that false reports also spread like wildfire. And since artificial intelligence finally arrived in the mainstream with image and text generation last fall, creating false reports has become a matter of seconds. Now both phenomena came together. And caused a brief slump in share prices.

It was a report that would have made the rounds very quickly if it were real news: An explosion had shaken the Pentagon, the seat of the US Department of Defense, it said. Pictures showed plumes of smoke rising from the building. But they were just as unreal as the supposed news sites that spread the message.

Rapidly viral on Elon Musk’s Twitter

The fact that the deceptively real images were created using artificial intelligence is not surprising at first. With programs like Midjourney, images can be created in a very short time that can hardly be distinguished from photos. It was not until February that an alleged snapshot of the Pope made the rounds (read more here). However, there was another reason why the Pentagon message spread so quickly: the creators took advantage of the fact that the security mechanisms on Twitter had been hijacked. And of all things from owner Elon Musk.

The false image was shared by accounts disguising themselves as a trusted news site. And so it was taken seriously by other, actually serious media for a short time. Among other things, one of the accounts claimed to belong to the stock exchange newspaper “Bloomberg”. Called “Bloomberg Feed” and branded with the company’s logo, it was easy to mistake at first glance for a legitimate news account.

Verified fakes

The fact that the news was taken seriously was because the fake accounts had appropriated Twitter’s former proof of trust: all were “verified” by the blue tick. But while that used to be proof of authenticity, under new owner Elon Musk, that was quickly eroded. Today, all you need to get the blue tick is a credit card and eight dollars. A small price to pay if you want to cause chaos.

When the first observers became suspicious, the news of the “big explosion” was already circulating. An Indian TV station reported about it, and the Russian state broadcaster “Russia Today” also took over the story. Another feature of Twitter’s subscription may also have had an effect: under the new tab “For you”, the network, which is popular with journalists worldwide, has recently also shown reports from people who are not followed. And prefer those who pay for the subscription themselves. The example for criticism was used accordingly quickly. “A prime example of why payment as verification is dangerous,” commented journalist Andy Campbell.

Real consequences – but only briefly

In fact, the hoax had repercussions in the real world as well. The US stock market – which “Bloomberg” is of course following particularly closely – collapsed briefly when panic selling began. Within minutes, the Dow stock index collapsed by 85 points. When the report was refuted as false, the price recovered just as quickly.

The episode shows how the combination of extremely fast breaking news on social media, the susceptibility to spectacular fake news and the easy availability of AI-generated content creates an explosive mixture. Twitter’s supposed security measure had not defused the situation, but instead exacerbated the problem.

Sources: Washington Post, CNN,