Analyst Downgrades Twitter After Trump Locked Out On Twitter, Facebook

Analyst Downgrades Twitter After Trump Locked Out On Twitter, Facebook

by  @lauriesullivan, January 11, 2021

Analyst Downgrades Twitter After Trump Locked Out On Twitter, Facebook | DeviceDaily.com

Trip Chowdhry, general manager at Global Equities Research, downgraded Twitter to “sell” on Monday, writing in a research note that he expects revenue in the June 2021 quarter to be “disastrous.”

Chowdhry estimates engagement will decline by about 15%, and so will Twitter’s revenue. He points to Twitter’s decision to shut down President Trump’s account last week after the chaos at the Capitol building.

In June 2020, Reddit removed Trump from its social media platform and engagement declined by 57%, he wrote, based on the analyst’s modeling. Less engagement will mean less revenue. Similar events will play out at Twitter. Any recovery in engagement may never occur, he wrote, based on Reddit as a benchmark.

A Reddit spokesperson in an email to Search & Performance Marketing Daily wrote “r/The_Donald, which was banned in June 2020, was not an official subreddit hosted by Donald Trump himself. The subreddit was a political one dedicated to supporting President Trump.”

Chowdhry’s track record for analysis is pretty strong. In August, he forecast that Oracle, not Microsoft, would win the bid to buy or, at the least, partner with TikTok. It did. He attributed the partnership to the security in Oracle’s cloud Infrastructure at the semiconductor-chip level like the Oracle Gen 2 Cloud Spartan chip.

President Trump also received unexpected backing from Germany and France after the U.S. president was banned from Twitter and Facebook. German Chancellor Angela Merkel objected to the decisions.

Twitter and Facebook can operate because they use the airwaves. Some say they should be governed by FCC laws. “Lawmakers should set the rules governing free speech and not private tech companies,” Merkel said, Bloomberg reported.

“The chancellor sees the complete closing down of the account of an elected president as problematic,” Steffen Seibert, her chief spokesman, said at a regular news conference in Berlin, reported Bloomberg. “Rights like the freedom of speech ‘can be interfered with, but by law and within the framework defined by the legislature — not according to a corporate decision’.”

French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire echoed Merkle’s objection. Calling the companies “the digital oligarchy,” Le Maire said the state and is responsible for regulations. Le Maire also called big tech one “threat” to democracy.

“Lawmakers should set the rules governing free speech and not private tech companies,” Bloomberg reported.

MediaPost.com: Search & Performance Marketing Daily

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