Welcome to "#SocialStocks," The Fly's weekly recap of Wall Street's reactions to social media stock news.
CITRON SAYS TWITTER IS THE “HARVEY WEINSTEIN OF SOCIAL MEDIA”: On Thursday, December 20, Citron Research published a note titled "Twitter has become the Harvey Weinstein of social media - Price target $20." Citron called Twitter (TWTR) uninvestable and put a $20 price target on the shares. According to the research note, "Amnesty International has concluded that Twitter is an abuser of human rights and has become a place that is 'toxic' for women, noting that women are abused every 30 seconds on Twitter. The study focused on 800 female journalists and politicians to show the culture of hate that underpins Twitter.” The note added that Twitter has "become uninvestable and advertisers will soon be forced to take a hard look at all sponsorships with Twitter” and "The culture of hate and anonymity should have Twitter trade at a discount to its closest peer, not a 100% premium. The hate on Twitter is real and the company is not taking proper steps to curb the problem." Shares of Twitter dropped 6% to $30.98 following the publication and continued 6% lower as of this writing to $27.53.
PINTEREST PINS EARLY 2019 FOR IPO: On Wednesday, December 19, the Wall Street Journal reported that Pinterest is getting ready to file for an IPO in early 2019. According to people familiar with the company’s plans, Pinterest is preparing for an initial public offering that could come as soon as April and value the company at or over above $12B.
NETFLIX WON’T SLIDE INTO YOUR FACEBOOK DMS: On Tuesday, December 18, the New York Times published a report alleging that Facebook (FB) provided more intrusive access to personal data that it disclosed. The times article referenced internal records from Facebook, noting it shared user data with major partners like Google (GOOG, GOOGL), Microsoft’s Bing (MSFT) search engine, Amazon (AMZN), and gave Netflix (NFLX) and Spotify (SPOT) the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages.
Later that evening, Netflix tweeted, “"Netflix never asked for, or accessed, anyone's private messages. We're not the type to slide into your DMs." Variety also reported on Tuesday that Spotify said it was "unaware of the broad powers Facebook had granted them."
On Wednesday, December 19, Facebook published a blog post to their newsroom page titled, “Facts About Facebook’s Messaging Partnerships” by Ime Archibong, VP of Product Partnerships. This blog post was a response to the New York Times article. In the post, Archibong said Facebook allowed Netflix and Spotify access to users' private messages in order to allow users of those apps to share messages with each other via Facebook Messenger, like music recommendations on Spotify and movies on Netflix. Archibong said the company needed to give those partners special access in order to enable messaging features. "We've been accused of disclosing people's private messages to partners without their knowledge. That's not true -- and we wanted to provide more facts about our messaging partnerships. We worked closely with four partners to integrate messaging capabilities into their products so people could message their Facebook friends -- but only if they chose to use Facebook Login. These experiences are common in our industry -- think of being able to have Alexa read your email aloud or to read your email on Apple's (AAPL) Mail app. People could message their friends about what they were listening to on Spotify or watching on Netflix, share folders on Dropbox, or get receipts from money transfers through the Royal Bank of Canada (RY) app. These experiences were publicly discussed. And they were clear to users and only available when people logged into these services with Facebook. However, they were experimental and have now been shut down for nearly three years."
-1.95 (-6.66%)
Pinterest trades under PINS
-0.36 (-1.47%)
Ticker changed to META
-7.37 (-5.52%)
Alphabet
-30.1 (-2.98%)
Alphabet
-34.22 (-3.34%)
Microsoft
-2.48 (-2.44%)
Amazon.com
-73.72 (-5.05%)
Netflix
-15.18 (-5.82%)
Spotify
-9.34 (-8.15%)
Apple
-3.96 (-2.52%)
Royal Bank of Canada
-0.59 (-0.86%)