At 1:07 p.m. on April 23, the official AP Twitter account sent a tweet to its 2 million followers: ‘Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured.’ Other AP accounts, as well as journalists, quickly flooded the site with claims that the message was false; others pointed out inconsistencies with the organisation’s house style. The message was the result of a hack, and the action was later claimed by the Syrian Electronic Army, a group of hackers affiliated with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and responsible for many website attacks as well as celebrity Twitter hacks.
