Twitter shares finished Friday 20% down at market close after reporting a decline in monthly active users during the second quarter, CNBC reports.
The big picture, from Axios' Dan Primack: The trouble here isn't revenue (it beat estimates) or earnings (it hit its number). Instead, it's about a decline in "monthly active users," a figure that was depressed for reasons like new privacy rules in Europe, a purging of fake/abusive accounts, and not moving to paid SMS carrier relationships.
Paul Packer, appointed by President Trump as chairman of the U.S. Commission to Preserve America’s Heritage Abroad, an independent government agency, has sent an official letter to Mark Zuckerberg condemning his comments on Holocaust denial and calling on Facebook to change its content policy.
Axios has obtained a copy of the letter, posted in full below, in which Packer puts pressure on Zuckerberg to meet his "ethical obligation" and not allow "further destruction" of history. Packer also invited Zuckerberg to join the Commission on a trip to countries previously under Nazi control in order to "educate" him about the importance of preserving history.
It may not have the traditional moat to fend off competition, but Slack has nonetheless managed to build quite the castle by out-executing its rivals.
Why it matters: Everyone in business software looks at Slack and says "I can do that." Yet most have flopped spectacularly, while Slack continues to power ahead even as Microsoft, Google and others remain in the hunt.
The founder of popular right-wing conspiracy site InfoWars has been banned from Facebook for a month, CNET reports, just a day after YouTube took down some of his videos and suspended his ability to broadcast live on their platform for 90 days.
Why it matters: Tech companies — including Twitter, Facebook and YouTube — are working to rein in content that is false or may incite violence, but some conservatives are alleging bias. The InfoWars page itself has not been banned.
Qualcomm yesterday disclosed that it will pay $2 billion to Dutch chipmaker NXP, after pulling the plug on a $44 billion takeover attempt.
The big picture: Qualcomm, which declined comment, seems to have made a $2 billion bet in April that trade tensions between the U.S. and China would settle down by mid-July. Perhaps it thought it really understood President Trump, since he had just saved it from a hostile takeover by Broadcom. It was wrong.
The big picture: That still doesn't beat out other major tech giants like Microsoft and Alphabet, per Stevens, but it is the third quarter in a row that showed profits of more than $1 billion.
Facebook's $120 billion stock drop — a company's biggest one-day loss of market value in U.S. history — isn't solely about Facebook, Felix Salmon,Slate columnist and "Slate Money" podcaster, writes in a special guest analysis for Axios.
Why it matters: The 19% plunge reflects the fragility of the tech sector as a whole. And it's all the proof you need that tech investors have moved from greed to fear.
Both Silicon Valley and privacy advocates are eyeing the potential for federal privacy legislation after California lawmakers passed their own sweeping measure.
Why it matters: In the wake of California’s bill and the recently-enacted General Data Protection Regulation in the European Union, industry may prefer a single national standard — and privacy advocates may applaud, too, preferring even partial nationwide rules to none at all.
American companies eager to enter China’s massive market brace themselves for potential intellectual property theft or forced technology transfers. But there’s another threat at play: their technology is being used for surveillance.
The big picture: China has sophisticated systems of state surveillance, and elements of these systems have long been powered by technologies developed by American companies. Beijing has used U.S. tech to surveil its citizens, violate human rights and even modernize its military.
Amazon’s facial recognition system, Rekognition, falsely matched 28 U.S. congressmen with criminal mugshots, the American Civil Liberties Union wrote in a blog post Thursday.
Why it matters: The result of the test, which compared all 535 members of Congress against 25,000 public mugshots, fuels the debate over whether algorithmic bias singles out more minorities by law enforcement.
Facebook shares fell nearly 19% on Thursday, or $41.24 per share, wiping out more than $119 billion in value. Within that is a $15 billion hit for founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Data: Money.NET; Chart: Harry Stevens/Axios
This came after Facebook reported slower revenue and user growth in the second quarter.
The big losses came in aftermarket trading yesterday, but Facebook was unable to make up much ground during today's session.
Some Republicans are seeing limited visibility of their accounts in Twitter's automated search box, Vice News reports. Conservatives have seized on the story — even though experts say that it does not prove ideological bias on the platform.
The big picture: Conservatives have claimed for years that social media platforms are biased against them, but Twitter has denied that it has targeted any specific group. A New York Law School professor, Ari Ezra Waldman, told Vice that this isn't indicative "of anti-conservative bias since some Republicans still appear and some don't. This just appears to be a cluster of conservatives who have been affected."
President Trump slammed Twitter's alleged practice of "shadow banning" conservative voices in a Thursday morning tweet:
"Twitter 'SHADOW BANNING' prominent Republicans. Not good. We will look into this discriminatory and illegal practice at once! Many complaints."
The big picture: Some prominent conservatives, like Donald Trump Jr.'s spokesperson and RNC Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel, no longer appeared in the automated drop-down portion of Twitter's search bar, Vice News reported yesterday. Kayvon Beykpour, the company's product lead, responded that the issue was a side effect of Twitter's use of machine learning to enact a new policy to "reduce people’s ability to detract from healthy public conversation" — an issue highlighted by New York magazine — and that it was issuing a fix.
Facebook lost more than $125 billion in value after the markets closed, with shares plummeting more than 20%, following an earnings report that missed revenue and user growth estimates.
Why it matters: Facebook is part of a small group of companies that has been keeping the overall stock markets afloat for much of 2018.
