Welcome to "#SocialStocks," The Fly's weekly recap of Wall Street's reactions to social media stock news.
FACEBOOK REMOVES 4.7M PIECES OF HATE CONTENT: On May 12, Facebook (FB) said that, in the first three months of 2020, it removed about 4.7 million pieces of content on Facebook connected to organized hate, an increase of over 3 million pieces of content from the previous quarter. "Additionally, we increased our proactive detection rate for organized hate, the percentage of content we remove that we detect before someone reports it to us, from 89.6% in Q4 2019 to 96.7% in Q1 2020," the company said in a blog post. "We saw similar progress on Instagram where our proactive detection rate increased from 57.6% to 68.9%, and we removed 175,000 pieces of content in Q1 2020, up from 139,800 the previous quarter. In addition, since we built this system for detecting organized hate content based on what we learned from detecting terrorist content, we've been able to identify where content related to one problem is distinct from the other. For example, we've seen that violations for organized hate are more likely to involve memes while terrorist propaganda is often dispersed from a central media arm of the organization and includes formalized branding. Identifying these patterns helps us continue to fine tune the systems for detecting organized hate and terrorist content."
PINTEREST LAUNCHES SHOPIFY PARTNERSHIP: On May 7, Pinterest (PINS) said in a blog post: "As more people than ever come to Pinterest to find inspiration for supporting small businesses, furnishing their work from home setups, gifts to cheer up friends, and activities to do with their kids, there's an increasing opportunity for retailers to get their products in front of Pinners. We're launching a new app with Shopify (SHOP) that gives their more than one million merchants a quick way to upload catalogs to Pinterest and turn their products into shoppable Product Pins, in just a few clicks.The Pinterest app on Shopify includes a suite of shopping features like tag installation, catalog ingestion, automatic daily updating of products, and an ads buying interface. For Shopify merchants, this means easy set up and access to distribution across Pinterest with or without ads, as well as reporting and results tracking to maximize reach. The app automatically creates a connection between the individual store and Pinterest, so the merchant doesn't need to edit code or add development resources, making it seamless for businesses of all sizes."
TECH COMPANIES EXPANDING WORK-FROM-HOME: On May 12, BuzzFeed’s Alex Kantrowitz reported that Twitter (TWTR) CEO Jack Dorsey has told employees that they can work from home forever, even after the coronavirus pandemic eases off. The company would require certain employees that work in roles requiring a physical presence, "such as maintaining servers," to come to work, added the BuzzFeed story. "We've been very thoughtful in how we've approached this from the time we were one of the first companies to move to a work-from-home model. We'll continue to be, and we'll continue to put the safety of our people and communities first," a Twitter spokesperson told BuzzFeed News.
On May 8, Business Insider's Hugh Langley reported that Google (GOOG, GOOGL) told employees during an all-hands meeting to expect to work from home for the remainder of the year. The company added that it will open its offices in June or July for those who need it. The company had previously extended work from home until June 1.
Additionally, on May 7, CNBC's Salvador Rodriguez reported that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is expected to announce that most of the company's employees will be given the choice to continue to work from home through the end of 2020. Rodriguez cited a company spokeswoman. The company will begin to open most of its offices on July 6, allowing employees who need to come in for their jobs to do so. Other employees who choose to return to the office will also be allowed to, the author noted.
Ticker changed to META
-5.24 (-2.50%)
-0.665 (-3.74%)
Shopify
-2.08 (-0.28%)
-0.93 (-3.19%)
Alphabet
-30.31 (-2.20%)
Alphabet
-27.06 (-1.97%)