Welcome to "#SocialStocks," The Fly's weekly recap of Wall Street's reactions to social media stock news.
FACEBOOK RELEASES PINTEREST-LIKE APP: On February 13, The Information's Alex Heath wrote that an experimental group within Facebook (FB) quietly released a Pinterest-like (PINS) app for saving and sharing photos of activities like cooking and home improvement projects. The app is called Hobbi and is meant to "help you document and remember the things you love to do," according to its App Store description.
On February 14, Wedbush analyst Ygal Arounian wrote that he doesn't see Hobbi as a meaningful risk to Pinterest. Arounian said the Facebook app seems to be more of an interest app centered around taking pictures on your phone and saving them in specific categories to "document and remember the things you love to do," while Pinterest is a significantly more complex product than this that aims to drive discovery and inspiration from a catalog of billions of pictures in its image graph.
TWITTER ACQUIRES CHROMA LABS: On February 18, Chroma Labs confirmed that Twitter (TWTR) acquired the company. "When we founded Chroma Labs in 2018, we set out to build a company to inspire creativity and help people tell their visual stories. During the past year, we've enabled creators and businesses around the world to create millions of stories with the Chroma Stories app. We're proud of this work, and look forward to continuing our mission at a larger scale - with one of the most important services in the world. As part of this we're shutting down our business, effective immediately. You'll still be able to use the Chroma Stories app to craft amazing stories as long as the app remains installed on your phone, and until there is some breaking change in a future iOS update." Terms of the deal have not been disclosed.
FACEBOOK SUSPENDS ACCOUNTS IN RUSSIA, IRAN, MYANMAR: On February 13, Facebook said it removed dozens of fake accounts from countries including Myanmar, Iran and Russia that were spreading misinformation, the latest effort by the social-media company to curb manipulation of its platforms. The company said in a blog post that it suspended pages and groups on Facebook as well as fake accounts on Instagram for violating its policies. The actions removed false and misleading content on a range of topics including U.S. elections and foreign-related topics. In some cases, Facebook removed content that may have been factually correct but was presented in a misleading way or posted by people posing as someone else. "We are making progress rooting out this abuse, but as we've said before, it's an ongoing challenge. We're committed to continually improving to stay ahead. That means building better technology, hiring more people and working closer with law enforcement, security experts and other companies." The company said it "removed 78 Facebook accounts, 11 Pages, 29 Groups and four Instagram accounts for violating our policy against foreign or government interference. This activity originated in Russia and focused primarily on Ukraine and neighboring countries. We also removed 6 Facebook accounts and 5 Instagram accounts that were involved in foreign interference as part of a small network originating in Iran that primarily focused on the US. Finally, we removed 13 Facebook accounts and 10 Pages for violating our policy against coordinated inauthentic behavior. This Myanmar-focused activity originated in Myanmar and Vietnam."
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