Twitter needs fixes now!!!

3 days prior to a presidential election in Ecuador the Twitter account of one of the two major newspapers was hacked and used to post fake news damaging the runner up candidate, who is in a very good position to force a ballot and pull a hard win on what could be the end of a 10-year period of yet another Chavez-like regime in South America. Furthermore, during the campaign, the current government has used its army of fake trolls to push trends to either damage opponents or to mitigate the dozens of accusations of corruption, like the well-know Odebretch case (Ecuador and Venezuela are the only Latin American countries where the list of names of bribed officials is not published yet!).

Twitter needs to take very seriously its role as the de-facto news/comm channel for political affairs!!!

The hacking problem seems easy to fix: a special client app that works with a USB key. They could even charge for it.

The fake accounts may be harder to fix but not impossible, if they cared.

If Twitter does not fix fake trends it is actually helping build a fake reality.