Welcome to "#SocialStocks," The Fly’s weekly recap of Wall Street’s reactions to social media stock news.
GOING FOR BROKE: Facing an advertising slowdown, Mark Zuckerberg’s and Meta (META), went forward with plans to "spend billions of dollars developing the metaverse," and Virtual reality devices, wrote CNBC’s Jonathan Vanian. Meta’s "bet on virtual reality" has not yet paid off, as sales of VR headsets in the U.S. this year declined 2% from 2021 to $1.1B as of early December, added the CNBC story, citing data shared by research firm NPD Group.
CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA SETTLEMENT: Facebook owner Meta Platforms has agreed to pay $725M to resolve a class-action lawsuit accusing the social media giant of allowing third parties, including Cambridge Analytica, to access users’ personal information. The proposed settlement was disclosed in a court filing on Thursday night.
DATA CONCERNS COME TO FRUITION: The parent company of TikTok, ByteDance, informed employees on Thursday that staff at the company had "improperly accessed the user data of two journalists on the social media service," Salvador Rodriguez reported for the Wall Street Journal, citing comments from ByteDance General Counsel Erich Andersen. Andersen describes the journalists as a former BuzzFeed reporter and a Financial Times reporter, noted the story.
NO POLICY IS THE BEST POLICY: Twitter (TWTR) laid off employees in its public policy team on Wednesday night, The Information’s Erin Woo reported, citing two people familiar with the matter.
OFFICE SPACE: Alphabet (GOOGL), Meta and Salesforce (CRM) are among the U.S. tech companies seeking to abandon leased office space in London and Dublin, The Financial Times’ George Hammond and Cristina Criddle reported, citing people familiar with the plans. Meanwhile, Amazon Web Services (AMZN) and Microsoft (MSFT) have put their London expansion plans on hold.
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