The algorithms following breaking news stories had no such discernment however. At 1:08 p.m., the Dow Jones, victim of the first flash crash in 2010, went into nosedive. Before most human viewers had even seen the tweet, the index had fallen 150 points in under two minutes, before bouncing back to its earlier value. In that time, it erased $136 billion in equity market value.32 While some commentators dismissed the event as ineffective or even juvenile, others pointed to the potential for new kinds of terrorism, disrupting markets through the manipulation of algorithmic processes.
