The shares of Twitter are trading higher following a fake report indicating that the company received a $31 billion takeover offer from an unidentified buyer. The story also mentioned that Twitter is working with bankers after receiving the offer.
The stock price of the microblogging company surged more than 8% after the fake story was circulated by a website that looks like Bloomberg.com. Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) lost most of the gains within 20 minutes.
The shares of Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) are trading $36.90 per share, up by more than 3% at the time of this writing around 1:56 in the afternoon in New York.
Bloomberg says Twitter (TWTR) story was fake
Ty Trippet, a spokesperson for Bloomberg, said the Twitter story published on the Bloomberg.market website was a fraud. He said, “The story was fake and appeared on a bogus website that was not affiliated with Bloomberg. The spokesman from Twitter also said the story was a fake.
Records from WHOis.net showed that WhoiGuard registered the Bloomberg.market website on July 10. The entity has a post-office box in Panama. WhoisGuard sell anonymization services for website owners. Bloomberg tried to contact WhoisGuard, but its attempts were unsuccessful.
A person familiar with the situation said the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is investigating the fake news article for potential market manipulation. SEC spokesman John Nester declined to comment on the matter.
Twitter (TWTR) drives efforts on Artificial Intelligence
Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) is developing a new team called “Cortex” to drive its efforts on Artificial Intelligence (AI). The Cortex team will handle the development of the “backbone: of its learning system.
The company is seeking architecture and system software engineers to work on deep learning, a specialized sector of AI.
Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) initially used AI to detect and remove porn and other offensive content on its platform at a lower cost. The company believes that AI could help boost its user growth.
The microblogging company aims to create a huge AI operation to understand better the needs of its users. Last year, Twitter acquired Madbit, an AI startup.
Earlier this month, Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) disclosed three products related to direct response advertising to boost its revenue. The company is expected to roll out the products to advertisers in the third quarter of this year.
