StockTok: ByteDance and TikTok await decision on ban following court hearing

Meta faces EU fine, Trump says he has no plan of selling Trump media shares and other notable stories from this week

Welcome to “StockTok,” The Fly’s weekly recap of Wall Street’s reactions to social media stock news.

HYBRID CLOUD PARTNERSHIP: 

Zoom Video (ZM) and Mitel announced a strategic partnership designed to empower enterprises worldwide with a hybrid cloud solution that combines Zoom Workplace and Zoom AI Companion with Mitel’s communications platform in a communication experience. The partnership will address growing enterprise demand for hybrid unified communications deployments with a “best-of-both-worlds” solution that delivers security and control for communications alongside collaboration to enhance business productivity. The partnership will introduce a Zoom-first experience within Mitel’s hybrid portfolio, including access to the full Zoom Workplace platform, which works with existing Mitel investments. The joint solution will be generally available for customers in the first half of 2025. Advanced capabilities are underway as part of the multi-phase partnership plan, and continued enhancements are being planned.

ANTITRUST LATEST: 

Meta Platforms (META) is facing an European Union fine overs its alleged efforts to dominate the classified advertising market, Javier Espinoza of The Financial Times reported. E.U. regulators intend to claim Meta links its free Marketplace services with the social network in an effort to undermine its rivals, people familiar with the mater told the Times. The decision could come as early as next month, three people with direct knowledge of the matter added.

SPECTACLES: 

On Tuesday, Snap (SNAP) debuted its new Spectacles.. The company blogged in part: “Today we’re introducing the fifth generation of Spectacles, our new see-through, standalone AR glasses that enable you to use Lenses and experience the world together with friends, in totally new ways. Spectacles are powered by Snap OS, our brand-new and groundbreaking operating system designed to enhance how people naturally interact with the world. Spectacles are available starting today as part of our Spectacles Developer Program. Spectacles also work seamlessly with your mobile device. Through the new Spectacles app, you can use your phone as a custom game controller with Lenses, launch Spectator Mode so friends without Spectacles can follow along, mirror your phone screen, and more…Snap OS brings Spectacles to life through an intuitive interface and capabilities that reflect how people naturally interact with the world. You can easily navigate Snap OS with your hands and voice – and the main menu is always in the palm of your hand. The Snap Spatial Engine understands the world around you so that Lenses appear realistically in three dimensions. An astounding 13 millisecond motion-to-photon latency renders Lenses with incredible accuracy, integrating them naturally into your environment…”

SLIGHT MISCALCULATION: 

Patrick Orlando, who left his leadership roles at Digital World Acquisition Corp. in 2023 and sued it this year, is entitled to almost 8.2M Class A shares of Trump Media (DJT), rather than the roughly 7.4M he was allotted, Delaware Chancery Court Judge Lori Will ruled, according to Bloomberg’s Jef Feeley and Bailey Lipschultz. The judge’s decision to award Orlando about 800,000 more shares, based on the finding that the special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, that brought Truth Social to the stock market had used the wrong stock conversion ratio, does not appear to affect the former president’s shareholding of about 60% in the company, Bloomberg noted.

SMART EYEWEAR PACT EXTENSION: 

EssilorLuxottica (ESLOY) has extended its partnership with Meta Platforms by entering into a new long-term agreement, under which the parties will collaborate into the next decade to develop multi-generational smart eyewear products. The two companies have been collaborating successfully since 2019, resulting in two generations of Ray-Ban branded smart glasses. The company sad, “By striking the ultimate balance between form and function, using EssilorLuxottica’s know-how in the industry and its global network of retail and wholesale locations together with Meta’s advancements in technology, Ray-Ban Meta glasses have garnered excitement and widespread adoption. The glasses, now a mainstream product, are in high demand in the markets they’re available in, including the US, CA, the UK, Australia and many European countries including Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Spain and Sweden.”

TEEN ACCOUNTS: 

Instagram said in a blog post: “Today, we’re introducing Instagram Teen Accounts, a new experience for teens, guided by parents. Teen Accounts have built-in protections which limit who can contact them and the content they see, and also provide new ways for teens to explore their interests. We’ll automatically place teens into Teen Accounts, and teens under 16 will need a parent’s permission to change any of these settings to be less strict. Teens will automatically be placed into the most restrictive setting of our sensitive content control, which limits the type of sensitive content teens see in places like Explore and Reels. Teens can only be tagged or mentioned by people they follow. We’ll also automatically turn on the most restrictive version of our anti-bullying feature, Hidden Words, so that offensive words and phrases will be filtered out of teens’ comments and DM requests. Teens will get notifications telling them to leave the app after 60 minutes each day. Sleep mode will be turned on between 10 PM and 7 AM, which will mute notifications overnight and send auto-replies to DMs. Teens under 16 will need their parent’s permission to use less protective settings. To get permission, teens will need to set up parental supervision on Instagram. Today, we’ll start placing teens who sign up for Instagram into Teen Accounts, and we’ll notify teens already using Instagram about these changes so we can begin moving them into Teen Accounts next week. We plan to place teens into Teen Accounts within 60 days in the US, UK, Canada and Australia, and to start placing them in Teen Accounts in the European Union later this year. Teens around the world will start to get Teen Accounts in January. We’ll also bring Teen Accounts to other Meta platforms next year. These are big updates that will change the Instagram experience for millions of teens, and we need to make sure they work correctly.”

Meta plans to bar Russian media outlets, including RT, from posting on its platforms, claiming the outlets had carried out covert influence campaigns across social media sites to manipulate online discourse, Mike Isaac and Sheera Frenkel of The New York Times reported. Meta plans to instill the ban in the coming days, which will be a move that escalates actions against Russian state media actors that U.S. intelligence officials have said run disinformation operations across social networks.

BUY: Cathie Wood’s ARK Investment bought 139.2K shares of Reddit (RDDT) on Monday

GOVERNMENT AUTHORIZATION: 

Zoom announced that The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, or FedRAMP, Joint Authorization Board, or JAB, authorized Zoom AI Companion as a JAB Moderate system, adding to Zoom for Government’s growing list of authorized products. “Most recently, Zoom Contact Center also received FedRAMP JAB certification as part of the Zoom for Government platform, in June of 2024. Now, U.S. federal agencies, state and local municipalities, and approved businesses and organizations that support U.S. government missions with paid Zoom accounts will have a FedRAMP-authorized, secure AI offering available to them, all within the familiar Zoom experience. Zoom for Government was initially FedRAMP authorized in March of 2019 and received collective JAB approval in July of 2023,” Zoom stated.

SALESFORCE INTEGRATION: 

Sprout Social (SPT) announced a new integration with Salesforce’s (CRM) Agentforce assistant for Service Cloud. The integration enables Salesforce Service Cloud and Sprout Social customers to gather customer insights from social and take accelerated action to enhance customer experiences. These updates will be featured at Dreamforce 2024, where Sprout Social will be exhibiting and speaking on how to leverage AI, social data and Salesforce to drive revenue, grow and retain a loyal customer base and strengthen brand equity.

FIGHT FOR SURVIVAL: 

ByteDance and TikTok faced a crucial court hearing on Monday in a legal battle to block a law that could ban the app used by 170M Americans as soon as January 19, Reuters’ David Shepardson noted. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia will hold oral arguments on the legal challenge, as both Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are active on TikTok seeking to court younger voters. It’s not clear when the court could reach a decision on the legislation.

HOLD: 

Shares of Trump Media jumped in Friday afternoon trading after majority owner Donald Trump said he has “absolutely no intention of selling” his stake when he is free to do so. The Republican presidential nominee, who would be allowed to start cashing in his nearly 57% stake in less than a week when a lockup agreement expires, said while speaking with the media that he does not intend to do so and does not need the money. In Friday afternoon trading, shares of the owner of Truth Social were up $4.05, or 25%, to $20.13.

LLAMA SUPERCOMPUTER CLUSTER: 

The Information’s Amir Efrati and Kalley Huang said they have learned that Meta is putting the final touches on a 100,000 GPU cluster, which will be a little bigger than 100,000 H100s, located somewhere in the U.S. The company will use the new supercomputer cluster to train the next version of its Llama model – Llama 4, according to a person familiar with the matter. The cost of the chips alone could be more than $2B, the authors noted. While the report does not say who is providing the Ethernet switches, analysts at Evercore ISI think “there is a high probability” that it is Arista Networks (ANET). As the story noted the GPUs alone could cost about $2B, and assuming GPUs represent 80% of total spend on an AI cluster, this would imply total cost of around $2.5B, of which 10% is likely spent on switching infrastructure, so this could represent a $250M revenue opportunity if Arista won the business, said Evercore, which has an Outperform rating and $400 price target on Arista shares.

SUPPRESSED LIKE WILDFIRE: 

An analysis found more than 40 examples of Facebook removing emergency-related posts during at least 20 U.S. wildfires since June 2024, The Washington Post reported. Meta says it is “investigating this issue,” according to the report.

NO CHOICE: 

Meta has admitted to scraping every Australian adult Facebook and Instagram user’s public data to train AI, with no opt-out, The ABC’s Jake Evans wrote. The company does not offer Australians an opt out option like it does in the EU, because it has not been required to do so under privacy law, Evans noted. Labor senator Tony Sheldon asked whether Meta had used Australian posts from as far back as 2007 to feed its AI products, to which Meta’s global privacy director Melinda Claybaugh responded, “we have not done that.” The Facebook representative could not answer whether the company scraped data from previous years of users who were now adults, but were under 18 when they created their accounts.

Deutsche Bank left Snap’s partner summit with “constructive views” on the coming “Simple Snapchat” interface. The interface introduces new monetization formats and aligns the app’s functionality with TikTok and Reels, which should bolster higher user engagement, the analyst told investors in a research note. The firm said the simplified architecture embeds advertising opportunities across all of Snaps’ consumer surfaces. Perhaps most importantly, the messaging surface now will feature stories, sponsored snaps, and promoted places, thereby monetizing surfaces that until recently were highly utilized, but under-monetized, noted Deutsche Bank.

RBC Capital reiterated the same rating on Pinterest (PINS) but added that the firm’s latest ad load analysis indicates that overall ad load ticked up compared toJuly, particularly for secondary categories. The higher overall ad load could suggest that the broader ad content is not hurting engagement, as recent UCAN user engagement and CPM trends have been largely better since Q2, the analyst told investors.

Goldman Sachs maintained the same rating on Reddit following the company’s presentation at the Communacopia & Technology conference. The firm’s takeaway from its discussion with the company CEO indicated that user and engagement growth remain strong and that the management sees a sizable runway for revenue growth across core advertising, data licensing and developer platform over the long-term, the analyst contended. Reddit is leveraging AI across a number of areas and use cases, and the company is well positioned given its unique corpus of data and content, the firm added.

—

Originally Posted September 18, 2024 – StockTok: ByteDance and TikTok await decision on ban following court hearing

Go Source