In 2010, Segway creator Jimi Heselden died by driving his Segway off a cliff. Though the incident this week with Twitter CFO Anthony Noto is not as extreme, it does reach to a similar level of irony.

Noto intended to send a private message and instead accidentally tweeted about what seems to be an acquisition of another company by Twitter. The tweet read, “I still think we should buy them. He is on your schedule for Dec 15 or 16 -- we will need to sell him. i have a plan.” Though it was swiftly deleted, Noto should know, better than most, that screenshots of tweets give them an afterlife even when presumed dead and gone.

Nick Woods, associate partner at communications consultancy Instinctif Partners, says, “It just highlights that social media is a channel where people can very easily make mistakes and you have to be very careful when talking about issues like that.”

It’s not unusual to see mistakes made by companies using Twitter, but the M&A implications of this make it an interesting case. From the investment point of view, Twitter has failed to capitalise on the promise its IPO last year. Additionally, though, the gaffe calls into question the regulations around financial information and social media. Woods says the UK government’s social media policy is still in the process of refining best practice in terms of the disclosure of market sensitive information via social.

He says, “The Twitter incident just adds further fuel to the fact that the regulatory framework needs to be better defined. The FCA will have to work out from an investor perspective what best practice looks like when disclosing market sensitive information.”

At the moment, market-sensitive information can be disclosed via social media or online platforms, provided that the company’s investors are aware of this and of which platform the company will be using. For instances like Noto’s tweet, there is little regulation in place as of yet, but it may inform the ways in which regulation will be shaped in future.