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The
slide came as some Republicans hit out over the weekend at the
platform for gagging one of its most watched participants, with
traders also pointing to signs that the affair was further
fuelling calls for greater regulation of Big Tech.
Trump's account had more than 88 million followers and had been
retweeted billions of times.
"Trump has a very high and loyal following and a lot of those
eyeballs will go away if Trump is permanently restricted from
posting," said Andrea Cicione, head of strategy at brokerage TS
Lombard.
Other social media platforms, including Facebook Inc, have been
quick to issue similar bans on the outgoing president last week
after the violence at Capitol Hill.
But the fall in Twitter's shares in premarket trading was much
heavier than for any of its peers.
U.S. media also reported San Francisco police were bracing for a
possible protest by pro-Trump supporters outside Twitter's
headquarters on Monday. (https://bit.ly/35qDDfG)
Twitter said on Friday Trump's suspension was due to the risk of
further violence, following the storming of the U.S. Capitol
last Wednesday.
It was the first time the company had banned a head of state and
was accompanied by the suspension of accounts belonging to
vitriolic Trump fans.
European Union Commissioner Thierry Breton said the events at
the Capitol were likely to herald an era of tougher social media
regulation, comparing it to the global crackdown on terrorism
after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
"The fact that a CEO can pull the plug on POTUS's loudspeaker
without any checks and balances is perplexing," he wrote in a
column for Politico.
"It is not only confirmation of the power of these platforms,
but it also displays deep weaknesses in the way our society is
organized in the digital space."
Twitter, Facebook and Google have faced a surge in the cost of
moderating content on their platforms in recent years, so far
countered by rises in the revenue they get from advertising and
other services.
U.S. President-elect Joe Biden has been quoted as criticising
the "overwhelming arrogance" of the sector's leaders and
analysts expect more legal moves to counter the power of
Facebook and others over the next four years.
"Incremental moderation may be welcome, but it's not cheap and
could benefit Facebook, which already employs a moderation army
(around six times) larger than Twitter's workforce," Bernstein
analysts wrote in a note.
(Reporting by Ambar Warrick and Sruthi Shankar in Bengaluru and
Thyagaraju Adinarayan and Julien Ponthus in London; Editing by
Rachel Armstrong, Kirsten Donovan and Arun Koyyur)
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