Twitter Stock Plunges After Conservative Purge & Trump Ban
Big Tech giant's share price sunk 11% on Monday following mass censorship
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Twitter took a huge financial hit on Monday, with its stock price sinking 11 percent as markets opened.
The value of Jack Dorsey's social media giant plunged for the first time after the company banned President Donald Trump and purged conservative accounts from its platform.
At Monday opening, stock bombed by 11%, and while it somewhat recovered, it remained 7% down for most of the day.
Early Tuesday morning shows Twitter shares are still down by around 6.4%.
On Friday night, Twitter permanently banned President Trump's account, citing a “risk of further incitement of violence.”
Twitter has also shut down a large number of conservative users' accounts in the days since the Capitol riot on January 6.
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Many large conservative accounts have noted losses of thousands of followers, and other high-profile figures on the right have been banned themselves, according to The Daily Caller.
A spokesperson for Twitter told the Daily Caller News Foundation that they were suspending accounts “in line with our policy on Coordinated Harmful Activity.”
Some conservatives have also voluntarily left the platform in protest of the president’s ban.
Since Twitter permanently banned Trump:
— Axios (@axios) January 11, 2021
• Stripe stopped processing payments for the Trump campaign
• Apple + Google kicked Parler out of app stores
• Amazon's AWS stopped providing Parler with cloud services
• Twilio and Okta stopped support of Parler https://t.co/92WOSmEaOl
Several industry analysts warned over the weekend that Twitter could be at higher risk of government regulation as a result of the moves, CNBC reports.
Parler, a competitor to Twitter that’s popular in right-wing circles, was banned from the Google Play Store and Apple’s App Store over the weekend, and went down as of Monday morning after Amazon ceased its hosting of the site.
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Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, appeared to celebrate the removal of his company’s chief competitor in a tweet on Saturday night.
He posted a photo showing that Parler was no longer the most popular app in Google Play’s store, as it had been before its removal.
— jack (@jack) January 10, 2021
While many Republicans have criticized Trump and his mob of supporters over the Capitol riots, the social media purge has stoked concerns that the major tech companies have too much control over communications platforms.
Conservatives are especially concerned that they will be targeted even further under a Joe Biden administration due to the tech companies’ closer ties to Democrats.
As Neon Nettle previously reported, former Vice President Biden's deep links to the top five Silicon Valley heavyweights have emerged.
Democrat Biden has picked at least 14 people who worked in key roles at Big Tech firms behind last week's anti-conservative crackdown to serve either in his administration or to advise his transition.
