There’s a high price to pay for banning President Donald Trump from social media platforms, and both Twitter and Facebook are feeling the massive bite out of their wallets for doing just that.
Both Twitter and Facebook “have collectively seen $51.2 billion erased from their market caps over the last two trading sessions as investors balk at their banning of President Trump,” according to Markets Insider. Facebook took the lion’s share of the losses, bleeding through a whopping “$47.6 billion following CEO Mark Zuckerberg's announcement that Trump would remain suspended from the social media platform ‘indefinitely,’ until at least after President-elect Joe Biden's inauguration,” Just the News reported. Both platforms did this following the Capitol Hill riot Jan. 6.
Both of these companies should learn that being woke doesn’t pay dividends. As Just the News noted, “investors balked at the tech giants' surprise censorship of Trump roughly two weeks before his term was set to end.”
Just the News outlined one of the root causes behind Facebook’s and Twitter’s market woes:
In the week since the bans were announced, users have reportedly been flocking to alternative social media sites, ones that have touted a commitment to censorship-free services in contrast to the heavier hands of the mainstream social media platforms.
Twitter apparently hasn’t received the message. A new video leak by Project Veritas showed Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey telling his employees that “This is going to be much bigger than just one account [Trump’s] and it's going to go on for much longer than just this day this week. And the next few weeks and go on beyond the inauguration.” He later said the censorship “is not going away.”
India Today observed that following the Trump ban, Twitter waged a scorched earth campaign against any account Trump used to reach his millions of followers:
Hours after Twitter Inc permanently banned Donald Trump's account citing ‘risk of further incitement of violence’ following the US Capitol violence on Wednesday, the US President vowed that he and his support base would not be silenced. Banned from Twitter, Donald Trump tweeted from the account of 'Team Trump' which was also suspended following his statement.
Apparently, Facebook didn’t get that message either. Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said in a Jan. 11 interview regarding Trump’s ban: “‘In this moment, the risk to our democracy was too big, that we felt we had to take the unprecedented step of what is an indefinite ban, and I’m glad we did.'” Facebook’s investors may have a different opinion. [Emphasis added.]
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