Twitter’s Wings Clipped As Regulation Threat Rises And Stock Skids

The Facebook data scandal has meant a rough ride for most social media stocks, and none was hit harder than Twitter yesterday as it lost 12% in a single session.

Until recently the FANG (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google) stocks and their peers had lifted Wall Street to a string of record highs but ever since the Facebook scandal broke last week, investors are taking a hard second look at all of them.

Related coverage: http://thegoldwater.com/news/21621-Facebook-US-FTC-Opens-Probe-As-Zuckerberg-Refuses-UK-Parliament-Appearance

Yesterday was Twitter’s turn when a financial firm, Citron Research, announced in a long await report that it would as from now shorten the stock, sending it into the doldrums.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Citron short <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%24TWTR&amp;src=ctag&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">$TWTR</a>. Near-Term target $25 Of all social media, they are most vulnerable to privacy regulation Wait until Senate finds out what Citron has published. <a href="https://t.co/nAkRWb8Kcn">https://t.co/nAkRWb8Kcn</a></p>&mdash; Citron Research (@CitronResearch) <a href="https://twitter.com/CitronResearch/status/978643993327124482?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 27, 2018</a></blockquote>

<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

Related coverage: http://thegoldwater.com/news/21554-Zuckerberg-Classmate-He-Stole-Facebook-From-Says-He-Warned-of-Cambridge-Analytica-Style-Flaw

As we here at thegoldwater.com have said before, Mr. Zuckerberg did not make many friends with this scandal in Silicon Valley as the market now expects regulation to be cloaked over all of them.

Already earlier this week the EU’s antitrust czar Ms. Vestager (who famously handed Apple a $15billion tax bill) repeated her threat to break up Google if they got too powerful and yesterday market analysts agreed that Twitter would be next in line.

Citron Research said in their report about Twitter that: “of all social media, they are most vulnerable to privacy regulation.”

The firm explained that, unaware to its users, an ever greater portion of Twitter’s revenue is being made from data licensing business, which means that the social media group “makes this money from selling user data even from private messages.”

In the US (just as in the UK), lawmakers are calling for Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mr. Mark Zuckerberg as well as Google CEO Mr. Sundar Pichai and Twitter CEO Mr. Jack Dorsey to testify before them and explain these matters in detail.

Source:

https://www.ft.com/content/150939ae-320b-11e8-b5bf-23cb17fd1498