The news of the Bitcoin fund by JP Morgan could be false

Yesterday, a news circulated widely on X that JP Morgan had announced its intention to offer its clients an actively managed Bitcoin fund.

The problem is that it seems it is not a confirmed news.

The source, in fact, does not appear to be official or authoritative, but it would seem to be just a tweet from BITCOINLFG.

BIG BREAKING 🚨

MAJOR U.S 🇺🇲 BANK GOES BIG ON #BITCOIN

JP Morgan announced plans to offer an actively managed #Bitcoin fund to its private wealth clients 📈 pic.twitter.com/6SMI0fRusD

— BITCOINLFG® (@bitcoinlfgo) September 22, 2024

Summary

• JP Morgan and the fake news about Bitcoin: the problem of the source
• The other sources
• The authority of the sources
• The problem of X: JP Morgan among the latest false Bitcoin news
• Propaganda vs. informazione

JP Morgan and the fake news about Bitcoin: the problem of the source

In cases like this, if the news is that of an announcement from the company JP Morgan, the only source that can certify the news is JP Morgan itself.

Neither on the company’s official website nor on their social channels is there any trace of this announcement.

So it is definitely an unconfirmed news.

At this point, however, there is also the doubt that it has not even been verified by the source that published it.

In fact, BITCOINLFG in the tweet with which it gave the news did not report any source from which it was taken, therefore the primary source turns out to be BITCOINLFG itself.

This is a news agency in the crypto sector, so the news given by them and of which they are the primary source should be verified by them before being published.

In that case unfortunately it is not known if they have verified it, also because they did not add any information to the tweet that could allow understanding if they have verified it or not.

Therefore, not only is it certainly an unconfirmed news, but we can also have legitimate doubts about whether it has been verified by the primary source that published it, namely the agency BITCOINLFG.

The other sources

At this point, it is advisable to also look for other primary sources to understand if there is any that have verified the news before reporting it.

The problem is that there seem to be none.

That is, although the news has been reported by many secondary sources on X, the only primary source appears to be the agency BITCOINLFG.

In the absence of other primary sources, it is not even possible to verify if the news has been verified by someone else, therefore if one wanted to consider it true at the current state, one would have to blindly trust BITCOINLFG.

The authority of the sources

How can one trust a source?

In fact, there is only one way. This system does not provide absolute certainty, but it increases the probability that relying on that source could be a good idea.

This is about verifying the authority of the source. If a source is considered authoritative, then it is easier to trust it, and it is less likely to lie.

Usually BITCOINLFG reports the sources of the news it gives, often adding videos to the tweets that show explicit statements from the protagonists of the news. In this specific case, however, it did not do so.

Additionally, BITCOINLFG has recently also published posts that are evidently advertisements but without specifying that they were advertisements. This is a very negative attitude, both because it would be mandatory to explicitly specify if a tweet is an advertisement in case it is, and because in this specific case the tweet was advertising an online casino.

In light of this, it is reasonable to have doubts about the authoritativeness of BITCOINLFG.

The problem of X: JP Morgan among the latest false Bitcoin news

It is not the first time that similar problems have occurred on X.

On the contrary, starting from the first of September, things seem to have gotten worse.

It has been discovered that X’s algorithm might disadvantage tweets that contain links to external sites.

This is an objective problem for the quality of information, given that very often to report the sources of the news it is necessary to add a link to an external site.

It is, however, even possible that the thing is intentional.

The main reason why X disfavors tweets with external links is that the new management (led by Elon Musk) does not want users to leave the platform to go to other platforms or external websites.

However, this also has another consequence, namely that most of the news circulating on X does not report the source. It is rare, in fact, that the primary source of a piece of news is someone else’s tweet; therefore, discouraging external links means discouraging users from having the possibility to verify the sources of the news.

This is exactly what happened with the unconfirmed news of JP Morgan’s announcement of its intention to offer its clients an actively managed Bitcoin fund.

Propaganda vs. informazione

The choice of X to disadvantage tweets with external links could have propagandistic purposes, especially in view of the presidential elections in November in the USA.

In fact, although discouraging the verification of news might not be the primary reason for this choice, at the same time, however, discouraging the verification of sources favors propaganda.

Elon Musk has been campaigning for Donald Trump for months now, and several times he has shared outright hoaxes debunked by community notes added by X users themselves on his tweets.

But the notes from the community are simply ignored by the majority of users, so while on one hand they are very useful for adding important information to tweets that do not report things exactly as they are, on the other hand they are not at all effective in limiting the spread of propaganda.

It should be remembered that propaganda is not made of true, confirmed, and verified information, but primarily of lies artfully created to convince people. This does not exclude that sometimes, rarely, propaganda reports the truth, but the fact remains that when it happens, it is mostly by pure chance.

And so unconfirmed news like the one given by BITCOINLFG, which could be true but could also be false, make their way around X undisturbed even if the primary source that generated them does not appear to be particularly reliable. Moreover, in these cases, it is more likely that they are fabricated news (and therefore false), rather than true news.

That does not change the fact that JP Morgan has now for months declared itself in favor of the crypto markets, but this does not necessarily mean that it has announced the launch of a fund on Bitcoin.

Source