#SocialStocks: Canada to cease ads on Facebook and Instagram

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

NO NEWS, NO ADS: Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government is ceasing its advertisements on Facebook and Instagram amid Meta‘ Platforms’ (META) plan to end Canadian news availability on its platforms, wrote Randy Thanthong-Knight for Bloomberg. “Platforms benefit from the status quo. They benefit from the fact that there’s currently nothing forcing them to contribute to our Canadian news system,” Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez said Wednesday in Ottawa, according to Bloomberg.

NEW THREADS:  Meta is expected to launch a Twitter (TWTR) rival this week called Threads, The Wall Street Journal’s Tim Higgins reported. Threads, which Meta has been planning for months, will be launched under the umbrella of Instagram, according to the report. However, the launch is not expected everywhere. Threads will not be launched in the EU “at this point,” according to a spokesperson from Ireland’s Data Protection Commission, The Next Web’s Sion Geschwindt reported. The delay of the platform launch in the EU is to avoid regulatory issues and not because Threads has been blocked by the DPC from EU app stores, the report noted

ANTITRUST LATEST: Meta Platforms lost a fight against a German data curb order as the Court of Justice of the European Union, CJEU, backed the German antitrust watchdog’s power to investigate privacy breaches, Foo Yun Chee of Reuters wrote. The ruling potentially gives antitrust authorities more leeway in probes into Big Tech.

THWARTING GOVERNMENT INTERFERENCE: U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty of Louisiana has issued a broad preliminary injunction limiting the federal government from communicating with social-media companies about online content, Jacob Gershman of The Wall Street Journal noted. Judge Doughty barred White House officials and federal agencies from contacting social-media companies with the purpose of suppressing speech protected from government censorship.

AD STORE?: Meta intended to allow the people in the EU to directly download apps through Facebook ads, setting the company up to eventually compete with app store rivals like Google (GOOGL) and Apple (AAPL), The Verge’s Alex Heath reported. The new type of advertisement is slated to begin as a pilot with a handful of Android app developers as soon as late 2023, the author noted.

PINSIDER SALE: In a regulatory filing, Pinterest (PINS) disclosed that its former CFO Todd Morgenfeld sold 60.7K shares of common stock in a total transaction size of $1.6M.

SNAPCHAT+ AFTER ONE YEAR: Snapchat (SNAP) is expected to announce on Thursday that its Snapchat+ has reached 4M paid subscribers in its first year, Sara Fischer of Axios reported. Two months after Snapchat+ launched in June 2022, the company announced that it had more than 1M users. “Since launching the service a year ago, the appetite for it has been incredible and our team is excited to continue driving a rapid cadence of new experiences for our growing subscriber base of more than four million,” said Jack Brody, vice president of product at Snapchat.

ANALYST COMMENTARY: B. Riley analyst Daniel Day attributes the rally Friday in shares of Shares of Digital Turbine (APPS) to a potential positive read-through for its SingleTap licensing efforts related to a Verge article published Thursday evening speculating that Meta Platforms has plans in place to allow European Android users to download apps through Facebook ads. If the description of Meta’s plans in the article is accurate, it is a reasonable conclusion that the company would require SingleTap to incorporate this app install functionality into the Facebook/Instagram apps, the analyst tells investors in a research note. Additional evidence indicating that a SingleTap licensing deal with Meta is potentially in the works is that the article states Meta’s initial plans are to specifically target Android devices rather than iPhones, and SingleTap functionality is only available on Android devices, says Riley. Nonetheless, the firm remains Neutral on Digital Turbine, saying it is unclear if awnings expectations have bottomed in the near term.