Media

Is Facebook a 'Shameful' Company?

Douglas A. McIntyre

Published: January 17, 2020 6:40 am

Last Updated: January 30, 2020 11:05 am

It seems House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has never thought positively about Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ: FB). She views it as a platform for disinformation meant to affect elections. She increased her criticism yesterday when she called Facebook a “shameful” company.

To extend her critique of Facebook, she added, Facebook is “accomplices for misleading the American people with money from god-knows-where.” Yes, her comments referred to the company in the plural. Nevertheless, it spells more trouble for Facebook because of the perceptions of powerful politicians.

Facebook continues to wrestle with the charge that people and foreign governments go on Facebook to lie about news, candidates and decisions that will drive the country’s future. Facebook says it has tried to help with the problem but that the number of posts on Facebook are in the hundreds of millions, or perhaps more, each day.

Facebook also has had to fight off criticism that it is supportive of some dangerous comments as free speech. Politicians, for the most part, do not agree that free speech should contain lies meant to sway public opinion.

As the elections approach, Facebook will be under more scrutiny and likely will take more beatings from politicians, and its executives may have to make further appearances before Congress. Some will argue that Facebook should be broken into pieces. However, so far that does not look like Facebook’s eventual fate. It will remain a single, very powerful company.

Facebook may be “shameful” but it continues to grow rapidly and is still among the world’s most influential tech companies.

Facebook stock is up more than 5% year to date and hit an all-time high of $222.63 on Thursday. It was up fractionally in Friday’s premarket, too. The analysts’ consensus price target is $243.51.