Welcome to "#SocialStocks," The Fly's weekly recap of Wall Street's reactions to social media stock news.
YOUTUBE BANS RACIAL, SEXUAL ORIENTATION INSULTS: In an update to its harassment policy, on December 11, Google's (GOOG, GOOGL) YouTube said it will no longer allow anyone to post content that "maliciously insults" others based on protected traits like race, gender expression, and sexual orientation. The company will now suspend members of its YouTube Partner Program for channels "that repeatedly brush up against our harassment policy," and said it may also consider removing content from the channel and potentially terminating the channel if the behavior continues. YouTube commented: "We remain committed to our openness as a platform and to ensuring that spirited debate and a vigorous exchange of ideas continue to thrive here. However, we will not tolerate harassment and we believe the steps outlined will contribute to our mission by making YouTube a better place for anyone to share their story or opinion."
TWITTER FUNDING TEAM TO DEVELOP DECENTRALIZED STANDARD FOR SOCIAL MEDIA: On December 11, Twitter (TWTR) CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted that the company is "funding a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media. The goal is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this standard." He added that "Twitter was so open early on that many saw its potential to be a decentralized internet standard, like SMTP (email protocol). For a variety of reasons, all reasonable at the time, we took a different path and increasingly centralized Twitter. But a lot's changed over the years." Dorsey, who is also the CEO of Square (SQ) also noted that "Square is doing exactly this for bitcoin with @sqcrypto. For social media, we'd like this team to either find an existing decentralized standard they can help move forward, or failing that, create one from scratch. That's the only direction we at Twitter, Inc. will provide."
WSJ SAYS FACEBOOK LOOKING TO LEASE SPACE IN MIDTOWN MANHATTAN: On December 6, Wall Street Journal's Keiko Morris reported, citing people familiar with the discussions, that Facebook (FB) is in talks to lease about 700,000 square feet of space at the Farley Building in Midtown Manhattan in a deal that would help offset the lack of Amazon's (AMZN) second headquarters earlier planned for the city. The space would be in addition to Facebook's recent deal to lease 1.5M square feet at the new Hudson Yards neighborhood.
SNAPCHAT FEATURE TO ALLOW USERS TO ‘DEEPFAKE’ INTO GIFS: On December 9, TechCrunch’s Josh Constine wrote that Snap’s (SNAP) Snapchat product is about to launch a feature "that uses your selfies to replace the faces of people in videos you can then share." Constine added, "It's essentially a simplified way to Deepfake you into GIFs. Snapchat Cameos are an alternative to Bitmoji for quickly conveying an emotion, reaction, or silly situation in Snapchat messages."
+0.31 (+1.04%)
Block
-0.3 (-0.46%)
Ticker changed to META
+0.13 (+0.06%)
Amazon.com
-0.47 (-0.03%)
Snap
+0.065 (+0.46%)
Alphabet
-0.3 (-0.02%)
Alphabet
-0.27 (-0.02%)