Twitter’s Stock Falls 12 Per Cent After Famed Analyst Andrew Left Calls It ‘Harvey Weinstein Of Social Media’

Twitter's stock fell over 12 per cent after Andrew Left, a famous Wall Street journalist, called the microblogging site as the “Harvey Weinstein of social media”, a few days after Amnesty International calls Twitter a “toxic” place for women, reports Tribune India.

Mr.Left, the founder of the online investment newsletter Citron Research, set a low target price of $20 after calling it the “Harvey Weinstein of social media”. He cited the recent Amnesty International study that said that Twitter was "a toxic place for women", especially to women of colour, politicians and journalists. Following this, the stock plummeted 12 per cent on Friday.

Citron wrote in its report that they had been following Twitter for many years and after reading the report from Amnesty International, they felt that the stock had become uninvestable and that the advertisers will soon be forced to take a hard look at all sponsorships with Twitter.

The report from AI states that on an average, women receive an abusive or problematic tweet every 30 seconds, with women of colour (i.e. Black, Asian, Latina and mixed-race women) being 34 per cent more likely to be mentioned in abusive or problematic tweets than white women.

Twitter responded by saying -"Our abusive behaviour policy strictly prohibits behaviour that harasses, intimidates or silences another user's voice."

Vijaya Gadde, the Legal, Policy and Trust and Safety Global Lead at Twitter defended, by saying that Amnesty didn't define precisely what abusive language was in the report and whether they are suggesting to remove it from Twitter.

The study however defined "problematic content" as content that is hurtful/hostile to an individual count.

"Twitter's failure to crack down on this problem means it is contributing to the silencing of already marginalised voices," said Milena Marin, Senior Advisor for Tactical Research at Amnesty International.