Shares of Facebook Inc. are on track to post their worst daily drop in about five years amid concerns about how the social-media giant managed user data. The company’s shares were down about 7% Monday afternoon at $172, with the stock on track to post the worst one-day decline since Sept. 24, 2012, 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, compared with the Dow Jones Industrial Average which also was narrowly negative for the first three months of 2018. The Dow was off 287 points on the day at 24,657, the S&P 500 index was down 1.3% at 2,715, but up 1.5% year to date. The technology laden Nasdaq Composite Index , however, was down 2.2% at 7,320, 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.
Market Pulse Stories are Rapid-fire, short news bursts on stocks and markets as they move. Visit MarketWatch.com for more information on this news.
From:: Stock Market News