Fake news spreads like wildfire. Do you ask why? Fake news is often aligned so well that it even tricks the minds of the very smart ones. It travels fast and this pandemic has accelerated its pace.
Let's get to the world we are living in right now. Elon Musk tweets about Dogecoin and its price spikes off the roof. A few more tweets by Elon, some bots, and a few fake accounts retweeting the same could any day bring the cryptocurrency to the point of a short squeeze for the traders.
Something very close to what happened with GameStop, where 8 million users from a Reddit page coordinated the purchase of stock from GameStop. Do you ask, consequences? The short squeeze caused major financial consequences for certain hedge funds and large losses for short-sellers, total loss amounting for institutional investors to $19.75 Billion (yes, with a “B”) by end of January 2021. That’s the power of social media today, it is becoming difficult to distinguish between reality and deliberate fabrications.
What exactly is digital forensics?
Simply put, digital forensics is a branch of forensic science that focuses on identifying, acquiring, processing, analysing, and reporting on data stored electronically. The way Sherlock Holmes investigated any crime scene — thoroughly and precisely.
Government regulations to comply with the data protection norms and the cyber-attacks, ransomware, malware, and other malpractices have increased the demand for the Digital Forensics Market. As of 2020, the global Digital Forensics Market size was valued at USD 6.8 Billion. It is now projected to reach USD 23.5 Billion by 2028.
So what is the big business opportunity here?
There are 3 gaps (read: business opportunities) that can make you a lot of money:
- A scalable solution that can monitor social media and market data in real-time to collect information about coordinated activity and/or disinformation
- Measure the impact of certain groups/ classes /networks of influencers on the social media momentum as a whole and certain groups of retail investors
- With the data collected and analysis performed, predict possible events driven by social-media activity and forecast potential monetary impact
New-age startups such as ZeNPulsar, with its solution such as Pump and Holmes, show a ray of hope in defending financial institutions against the increasing threat of online disinformation by detecting & predicting social media manipulation. Only time will tell how far they will go, but they will certainly help many financial institutions and retail investors (like you and me) save millions (if not, billions) of dollars.
