Twitter, Social Media Stocks Trading Lower After Trump Ban
Shares of Twitter fell more than 10% in early trading after the social media platform banned President Donald Trump permanently Friday for risk of inciting violence, but had regained some ground by late morning.
The stock is changing hands at $48, down about 6.7%.
Trump egged on supporters at a rally Wednesday, reiterating false claims the election had been stolen. A mob then violently trashed the Capitol building resulting in five deaths as lawmakers attempted to ratify president-elect Joe Biden’s electoral college victory.
The markets mostly shrugged off the chaos last week.
On Monday, the DJIA had slipped 0.43% and the tech heavy Nasdaq was off 0.79%, with social media stocks down by more that than. Facebook, which also banned the president, is off 2.9%. Apple, Google and Amazon, which stopped supporting the smaller, alt-Twitter platform Parler, were trading down, respectively, 1.53%, 1.02% and 1.18%.
Trump had 88 million Twitter followers and the service had been his main communication conduit throughout his presidency. Trump supporters who claimed that Twitter was biased against them flocked to Parler, which has less stringent terms of use.
Trump posted a message on the official government Twitter account @POTUS, blasting the platform for banning @realdonaldtrump and vowing, “We will not be silenced!”
Trump also said they are “negotiating with “various other sites,” and even looking at the possibilities of “building out our own platform in the near future.”
Twitter initially said that it would keep the @POTUS account active but would continue to monitor it. Within minutes after posting, Trump’s tweets disappeared from that account, too. Twitter said that they violated rules that prohibit using another account to evade suspension.
He hasn’t been heard from publicly since his latest Tweets but is said to be planning a visit to the town of Alamo, Texas tomorrow to mark completion of 400 miles of border wall.
Congress is preparing a vote to urge Vice President Mike Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove the president, and if there’s no movement on that in 24 hours, drawing up articles of impeachment.
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