- Couldn’t happen to nicer companies — Twitter and Facebook
Twitter and Facebook are run by what appears to be a bunch of globaloneyists (glancing at the bios of various principals) who are not merely succumbing to political correctness (bad enough) but willing manipulators. They are two companies definitively not for freedom of speech or actual privacy they are controllers of popular social media platforms as corrupted as the American Civil Liberties Union has become — speech protections for me but not for thee — and grubby manipulative data aggrandizers. Those personal data accumulations they keep are all for sale.
How Conservatives Are Being Destroyed by Facebook, Twitter and Google Without Even Realizing It
CENSORED! How Facebook, Twitter, Google and YouTube Are Suppressing Conservative Speech
For the moment they still provide an avenue for real alternatives to the thought control of dominant mainstream liberal media but their management groups are trying to be facilitators, reinforces of that favored liberal zeitgeist. Conservatives should gravitate away from them while recognizing the usefulness of timely if not instant communication alternatives more honest, less subject to outside manipulation, and secure. In the mean-time be bold, out post, out influence the usual suspects however inhibited and foster changers to the platforms’ modus that insure privacy as the default setting and the presumption of ownership of all data to the individual users and transparency as to policies regarding censorship.
Oh the reasons for the stock downturns may not be all that encouraging but to the extent their wealth aggrandizement has reinforced their influence well we take heart. This particular article ascribes to the tyranny of missed projections
Why Facebook and Twitter Both Got Crushed After Earnings
Posted by: Rick Pendergraft July 28, 2018
Social networking companies Facebook and Twitter both reported earnings this past week and both saw violent drops in their stock price after the reports. Facebook dropped 19% on Thursday and according to Bloomberg, that decline erased $120 billion in market cap, more market capitalization than any decline in history. Twitter reported Friday morning and opened over 13% lower and was down 18.5% at Noon.
Facebook beat its consensus EPS estimate, but missed its revenue estimate. Twitter beat both the EPS estimate and the revenue estimate. The problem came from the user growth forecast for each company. For Facebook, user numbers in the U.S. and Canada were stagnant on a quarter over quarter basis and the number of users in Europe declined from the previous quarter.
In the conference call following the release, it was revealed that the company expects the revenue growth to continue decelerating. “Our total revenue-growth rates will continue to decelerate in the second half of 2018, and we expect our revenue-growth rates to decline by high-single-digit percentages from prior quarters sequentially in both Q3 and Q4,” David Wehner, Chief Financial Officer.
In Twitter’s case, the company saw monthly active users decline from 336 million last quarter to 335 million in the second quarter. Analysts expected Twitter to grow monthly active users to 338.5 million.
Both companies are dealing with several issues, including privacy changes by the European Union. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a regulation in EU law on data protection and privacy for all individuals within the EU and it went in to effect in May. The decline in Facebook users in Europe can be attributed to the new laws and it likely played a role in Twitter’s monthly active user decline.
In addition, Facebook is still facing criticism from the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the election meddling scandal. For Twitter, President Trump criticized the company for “shadow banning” Republicans. Shadow banning is a practice of limiting the visibility of a Twitter user in the platform’s auto-populated search box. Twitter denied the allegations.
Obviously both companies have issues and both have seen incredible growth in recent years and that might be part of the problem. The growth rates and expectations were unsustainable. . . .
Related reading:
Social media alternatives here and here
https://qz.com/1301107/twitter-ceo-jack-dorsey-got-a-nose-ring-and-wall-street-seems-pleased/
Never trust anyone with a nose ring– they are either pirates or really goofy