Welcome to "#SocialStocks," The Fly's weekly recap of Wall Street's reactions to social media stock news.
FACEBOOK, TWITTER ADDRESS THE ELECTION: Facebook (FB) founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the company estimates that it has helped 4.4M people register to vote across the company's various platforms. "This year, we launched the largest voting information campaign in US history, with the goal of helping 4 million people register to vote," Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post. Facebook teams have planned for the possibility of trying to calm election-related conflict in the U.S. by deploying internal tools, The Wall Street Journal's Jeff Horwitz and Deepa Seetharaman reported, citing people familiar with the matter. Sources noted the emergency measures include slowing the spread of viral content and lowering the bar for suppressing potentially inflammatory posts. They are part of a larger tool kit developed by Facebook to prepare for the U.S. election. Twitter (TWTR) has offered its own version of aid to its users during the election process with a newly implemented app banner offering information about election results and voting by mail. These banners have appeared on the home timelines of all U.S.-based users, The Verge's Adi Robertson reported. The banners reappear when users search for election-related phrases or hashtags. The company reportedly said the new pop-ups "preemptively address topics that are likely to be the subject of election misinformation."
SENATE COMMERCE COMMITTEE HEARING: The Senate Commerce Committee held a hearing entitled, "Does Section 230's Sweeping Immunity Enable Big Tech Bad Behavior?" with CEO Jack Dorsey of Twitter, CEO Sundar Pichai of Alphabet/Google (GOOG, GOOGL) and CEO Mark Zuckerberg . The three witnesses and committee members took part in the four-hour hearing earlier today at 10 a.m. The Senate committee described the purpose of the hearing as follows: "The hearing will examine whether Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act has outlived its usefulness in today’s digital age. It will also examine legislative proposals to modernize the decades-old law, increase transparency and accountability among big technology companies for their content moderation practices, and explore the impact of large ad-tech platforms on local journalism and consumer privacy. The hearing will provide an opportunity to discuss the unintended consequences of Section 230’s liability shield and how best to preserve the internet as a forum for open discourse."
HANDS-OFF MANAGEMENT AT TWITTER: Twitter and Square (SQ) employees have said CEO Jack Dorsey takes hands-off management to extremes, delegating or delaying most major decisions, sometimes to pursue his passions, The Wall Street Journal's Kirsten Grind and Georgia Wells reported. According to people familiar with the matter, Dorsey wasn't involved in the initial discussions about blocking Twitter users from sharing links to a pair of New York Post stories about Joe Biden 's son, Hunter Biden. The WSJ report noted that Dorsey’s absence from a key decision isn’t unusual. The Post stories were reportedly one of the topics, along with other content moderation issues, discussed at the hearing earlier.
TIKTOK HIRES AHEAD OF BAN DECISION: TikTok intends to hire roughly 3,000 engineers over the next three years, mainly in Europe, Canada, and Singapore, Reuters' Echo Wang reported. U.S. President Donald Trump has ordered TikTok owner ByteDance, a Chinese company, to divest TikTok amid worries over personal data security, Wang noted. "To support our rapid global growth, we plan to continue expanding TikTok's global engineering team, including adding approximately 3,000 engineers in Canada, Europe, Singapore, as well as the U.S., over the next three years," a TikTok spokesman told Reuters. The spokesperson added that the United States will remain one of the engineering hubs for the company and hire more staff. This comes after a previous report that ByteDance planned to invest billions of dollars and recruit hundreds of employees in Singapore, which it has selected as its Southeast Asia headquarters. On Nov. 4 a judge will decide whether the U.S. government could be allowed to ban downloads of TikTok from U.S. app stores, a move that ByteDance has cautioned would ultimately ban use of the app in the U.S. The Fly notes that Oracle (ORCL) and Walmart (WMT) have agreed to take stakes in TikTok Global, a newly created U.S. company that will own most of the app's operations worldwide.
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