Shares of Facebook Inc. posted their worst daily drop in about four years amid concerns about how the social-media giant managed user data. The company’s shares finished down about 6.8% on Monday at $172.56, with the stock logging its steepest one-day decline since March 26, 2014, according to FactSet data. U.S. and British lawmakers slammed Facebook over the weekend for not providing more information about how the data firm, Cambridge Analytica, came to access information about potentially tens of millions of the social network’s members without their explicit permission around the time of the 2016 presidential election. Selling in Facebook was weighing on the broader technology sector . Among other social-media companies, Twitter Inc. fell 0.6% while Snap Inc. shares were down 2.5%. Shares of Facebook turned negative for the year, down 2.2%, compared with the Dow Jones Industrial Average which also was down 0.4% for the first three months of 2018. The Dow closed 335 points, or 1.4%, at 24,610, the S&P 500 index finished down 1.4% at 2,712, but up 1.5% year to date. The technology laden Nasdaq Composite Index , however, ended the session 1.8% lower at 7,312, enduring the biggest fall on the day from the pressure in tech names. For the year, the benchmark was up 6.4%. Because Facebook boasts a market value of more than $500 billion it can influence many market-capitalization-weighted indexes, dragging them higher or lower.
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