Facebook’s stock has fallen sharply after former President Donald Trump went on a rant on two separate occasions about the American technology company.
Founder Mark Zuckerberg was caught directly in the cross-fire too, with Trump writing on Truth Social: “If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business. I don’t want Facebook, who cheated in the last Election, doing better. They are a true Enemy of the People.”
The 45th U.S. President then went on CNBC’s ‘Squawk Box,’ and further criticized Facebook when speaking about a bill going through the House of Representatives to regulate competitor TikTok. He said: “I’m not looking to make Facebook double the size…
“And I think Facebook has been very dishonest. I think Facebook has been very bad for our country, especially when it comes to elections.”
On both the day of the social media post and after the interview, the stock of Meta, which is the parent company of Facebook, dropped.
Meta saw the lowest closing figure since last July, Forbes reported. The shares dropped by about 4.5 percent to just under $484 on Monday, after the CNBC feature.
The shares dropped by 1.2 percent after the social media post went live on the Friday before.
On Tuesday 12 March, Donald Trump once again took to the site Truth Social to share a news article link with the title ‘Meta’s stock drops twice after Trump calls Facebook ‘an enemy of the people.’
What does Donald Trump think of TikTok
Much of Donald Trump’s scathing comments against Facebook then pivoted to give support of the video app TikTok.
This comes after the House Energy and Commerce Committee unanimously voted to advance legislation that would force ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, to divest ownership of the app.
The reason for this is that ByteDance is a Chinese company, which has led to fear among Americans over their user data security.
While Trump now seems to be in favor of the app which took the world by storm, it wasn’t always that way. In August 2020, when he was still president, he said he intended to ban TikTok and even signed an executive order banning U.S. companies from transactions with ByteDance.
Featured image: Generated by ideogram
