Welcome to "#SocialStocks," The Fly's weekly recap of Wall Street's reactions to social media stock news.
ANTITRUST LATEST: After house lawmakers introduced a large antitrust legislation aimed at restraining the power of Big Tech companies, Apple's (AAPL) CEO Tim Cook called several members of congress to deliver a warning, Cecilia Kang, David McCabe, and Kenneth Vogel of The New York Times reported. Cook reportedly warned the bills were rushed, would crimp innovation, and would hurt customers by disrupting services, according to five people with knowledge of the conversations. The six antitrust bills take aim specifically at Amazon (AMZN), Apple, Facebook (FB), and Google (GOOG;GOOGL) by trying to undo or remove some of the companies' dominant online presence.
U.S. Representative Jim Jordan, a Republican from Ohio, is calling on Microsoft (MSFT) to face similar antitrust scrutiny as other major tech companies, including Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google, according to a letter Jordan sent to Microsoft president Brad Smith. "Big Tech, including Microsoft, Inc., is out to get conservatives," Jordan wrote in the letter. "Despite Microsoft's size and market dominance, House Democrats curiously did not significantly examine Microsoft's conduct during their investigation of competition in digital markets. Democrats also seem to have excluded Microsoft from scrutiny in their large package of bills to radically rewrite American antitrust law. We write to request more information about these matters."
Germany's Federal Cartel Office said in a statement that it has initiated a proceeding against the technology company Apple based on the new competition law rules for large digital companies. This is the fourth large digital company against which the authority is taking action based on this new competition law tool. In the past months, the Bundeskartellamt has already initiated similar investigations against Facebook, Amazon and Google. The Bundeskartellamt has initiated the first step against Apple in a proceeding to determine whether the company is of paramount significance across markets. An ecosystem which extends across various markets may be an indication that a company holds such a position.
OH SNAP: Snap (SNAP), which was up $3.45, or 5%, to $66.38 in Wednesday afternoon trading, was named by Investor's Business Daily as its "stock of the day." Snap "may be getting ready to finally break into a buy zone" after having "approached an entry point several times recently but hit resistance," according to IBD's report.
TWITTER BEGINS MONETIZATION: Twitter (TWTR) is opening applications for a limited test of its Super Follows and Ticketed Spaces features and will select a small group of users to test its new monetization features, reported The Verge's Adi Robertson. Test group participants will initially keep 97% of the money they make with Ticketed Spaces or Super Follows, after fees, but Twitter will increase its cut from 3% to 20% if a user makes a total of $50,000 on both systems, the report noted. Twitter's 20% cut still comes in lower than Amazon's Twitch which charges 50% an YouTube's 30% fee.
SOCIAL STOCK SALES: ARK Investment Management disclosed in its daily update on portfolio adjustments made by the ARK investment team that on June 21 the ARK Fintech Innovation ETF (ARKF) sold 321,235 shares of Pinterest (PINS) and sold 360,507 shares of Snap.
Separately, in a regulatory filing, Zoom Video disclosed that its CEO Eric Yuan sold 96,154 shares of common stock in total transaction size of $35.5M as part of option expiry. In other Zoom news, Needham analyst Ryan Koontz initiated coverage of the stock with a Hold rating and no price target. The analyst looks for continued traction with phone, particularly in enterprise, evidence of stable churn in small business, further success in the channel and more clarity on the monetization timing for Zapps and Zoom Events before gaining more conviction on the stock at its current valuation.
AUDIO ROOM LAUNCH: Facebook has officially launched Live Audio Rooms in the U.S. on iOS, piloting the Clubhouse-like service with public figures and select Facebook Groups, and is also debuting an initial set of U.S. podcast partners, TechCrunch's Sarah Perez reported. The social media giant told TechCrunch that Rooms will become available to any verified public figure or creator in the U.S. who is in good standing with the company and is using either a profile or the Pages experience on iOS. Facebook also told TechCrunch that it is launching a new Groups experience with dozens of groups. Any Facebook users in the U.S. will be able to listen to Live Audio Rooms and podcasts as of this week. Other audio products potentially in the cards are a central listening destination and background audio listening for videos.
AMAZON SEEKS PARTNERS TO COMBAT FAKE REVIEWS: In a blog post, Amazon called on social media companies, whose services are being used to facilitate fake reviews, to proactively invest in fraud and fake review controls and partner with the company to stop bad actors in an effort to help consumers shop with confidence. It will take constant innovation and partnership across industries and law enforcement to fully protect consumers and our honest selling partners, Amazon said. "Due to our continued improvements in detection of fake reviews and connections between bad-actor buying and selling accounts, we have seen an increasing trend of bad actors attempting to solicit fake reviews outside Amazon, particularly via social media services," the company said. "Some use social media services on their own; in other cases, they hire a third-party service provider to perpetrate this activity on their behalf. However, bad actors regularly try to take this transaction outside Amazon to obscure our ability to detect their activity and the relationship between the multiple accounts committing or benefiting from this abuse. As a result, we use a number of techniques, including advanced machine learning, to try to detect groups of connected entities-customer accounts, selling accounts, products, brands, and more. However, it's also clear that this is an industry-wide battle, and we need to work together to make faster progress. When we detect fake reviews that may have been perpetrated outside Amazon, we regularly report the activity to the social media company where it occurred. In the first three months of 2020, we reported more than 300 groups to social media companies, who then took a median time of 45 days to shut down those groups from using their service to perpetrate abuse. In the first three months of 2021, we reported more than 1,000 such groups, with social media services taking a median time of five days to take them down. While we appreciate that some social media companies have become much faster at responding, to address this problem at scale, it is imperative for social media companies to invest adequately in proactive controls to detect and enforce fake reviews ahead of our reporting the issue to them. Protecting consumers will require all of us to work together to ensure we leverage our unique knowledge, partner with each other, and stop attempted fraud and fake reviews before it has a chance of impacting consumers."
JUMPING FOR JOY: Sean Kim, Head of Product, TikTok U.S., in a blog post introduced TikTok Jump, a new way for creators to share content on TikTok. Built by third-party providers, Jumps are mini-programs and services that creators can link to within their videos. Users around the world can click these links to explore recipes, take quizzes, discover learning tools. The company said, "TikTok has become a destination both to be entertained and to learn; through TikTok Jump, we're creating that "last mile" of our community's discovery journey and helping to spark action and deeper interaction both on and off the platform. An expanded group of creators will now be able to use Jumps in their videos, and we'll continue to gradually roll out availability more broadly."
Apple
-0.04 (-0.03%)
Amazon.com
+4.46 (+0.13%)
Ticker changed to META
+2.71 (+0.80%)
Alphabet
-1.215 (-0.05%)
Alphabet
-2.4 (-0.10%)
Snap
+3.24 (+5.15%)
+2.925 (+4.59%)
ARK Fintech Innovation ETF
+0.74 (+1.42%)
+1.73 (+2.37%)
Zoom Video
+2.39 (+0.64%)