An editorial mix-up has harmful consequences for a digital wallet company in the online sphere.
A bout of misinformation that stemmed from a small misunderstanding has drastically affected the online reputation of a cryptocurrency digital wallet.
A CCN breaking news story mistakenly reported the wrong company had laid off around ten percent of its workers. The editorial error occurred in the headline itself, naming Trezor instead of Ledger as the culprit.
Both brands are manufacturers of digital cryptocurrency wallets.
Following this, news outlets, social media accounts, bots, and feeds immediately started circulating the news story. The erroneous headline even made its way to Yahoo! News.
While Yahoo! News issued a correction after the mix-up was clarified, several other small to medium-sized news outlets and social media posts have yet to do the same. However, most of the original articles that were posted have been completely removed.
This mix-up has raised discussions regarding the quality as well as the editorial standards for news in the cryptocurrency space. It is not the first time that misinformation has circulated widely within the industry; just this May, a fake tweet sent out by a Twitter account claiming to be the CEO of BitMEX complained about Bitcoin prices being “too high”.
While the account changed its username soon after, multiple crypto-enthusiasts around the Twitter verse believed that it was an actual tweet from the CEO himself, and a cryptocurrency news outlet went as far as to write a report on it.
Prior to this, cryptocurrency media outlets also spinned a news story out of a tweet unrelated to cryptocurrency last September 2019.
A Bloomberg reporter had tweeted about the NSA working on “quantum-resistant crypto”, with “crypto” referring to cryptography. However, multiple media outlets immediately jumped on the tweet and started writing erroneous reports about the NSA working on a cryptocurrency.
While all forms of media suffer from the risk of creating and propagating fake news, the cryptocurrency industry appears to be more challenged in the fight against it. Proposals to help mitigate the appearance as well as the spread of misinformation include employing artificial intelligence to actively point out these news articles and calls for increased media regulation for the industry.