After a Facebook (FB) whistleblower said that the business prioritizes profit over hate speech, shares of social media companies Twitter (TWTR) and Snapchat (SNAP) dropped Monday, investors were increasingly skeptical of other digital platforms.
Twitter’s stock sank 5.9% to $58.39 on Monday, while Snapchat’s stock slid 5.34 percent to $71.23 on the same day. Facebook’s stock dropped 4.89 percent to $326.23 in after-hours trading.
In a global outage that began about noon Eastern on Monday, Facebook and its family of apps were also unavailable.
Frances Haugen, Facebook’s former product manager, in an interview with CBS’s “There were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook,” stated 60 Minutes on Sunday night. And Facebook has often chosen to optimize for its own goals, such as increasing revenue.”
According to reports, Haugen’s legal counsel has filed at least eight complaints with the Securities and Exchange Commission regarding Facebook.
“To imply we encourage terrible stuff and do nothing is just not accurate,” Facebook’s Andy Stone told the Wall Street Journal.
On Tuesday, Haugen will speak before a Senate subcommittee regarding the company’s research into Instagram’s impact on young users at a hearing titled “Protecting Kids Online.”
Facebook stopped development on its photo-and-video-sharing Instagram programme last week to do further study for a project geared at children.
Over the last few weeks, there has been a continuous drumbeat of bad stories about Facebook, which has harmed its shares. First, according to The Wall Street Journal, internal papers reveal that the social media platform was aware of the app’s harmful impact on young girls.
According to The Journal, the findings of this study were highlighted in a presentation given to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg last year.
Anti-vaccination campaigners exploited Facebook to disrupt the social media giant’s vaccine promotion efforts, according to a second investigation by The Journal. Facebook was unable to prevent users from filling the site with “cesspools of anti-vaccine remarks,” according to the company’s experts.
The shares of Twitter dropped after a CBS interview with a former employee who slammed the business. The wider tech industry is currently being dragged down by rising rates. Twitter is an open distribution network for short-form text (up to 280 characters), picture, and video material, as well as a chat platform.
Twitter has a 52-week high of $80.75 and a 52-week low of $38.93, respectively.
