TOBY SHAPSHAK: Facebook’s $120bn plunge brings schadenfreude
Losing $120bn is the first major financial consequence of Facebook’s lax privacy policies
Facebook’s critics would have experienced a fair amount of schadenfreude last week when it lost a fifth of its value when weaker-than-expected results wiped $120bn off its value. It’s now the largest one-day sell-off in history, but also the biggest sign yet that Facebook’s privacy transgressions are catching up with it. Finally. It seemed Facebook was impervious to the direct hits that would have sunk any other business — brought on by one scandal after another, from Russian internet trolls meddling in US elections to the enormous privacy violations its lax terms allowed Cambridge Analytica to pull off. But it missed Wall Street’s expectations last week and it gave jittery brokers the gap they needed to express months of frustration and concern. Brokers must have been primed for a run on Facebook’s stock when another of the scandals broke. They might have thought this was it. Nobody said the stock market was a rational place. This was despite otherwise good results: revenue was up ...
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