Facebook ended the week $58bn lower in value after its handling of a historic data breach.
Its founder Mark Zuckerberg apologised for data breaches that affected 50 million users.
The apology did not stop investors from selling shares in Facebook, with many wondering just how bad the damage would be for the social network.
The breach was called a “light bulb” moment for users, spawning the social media trend #deletefacebook.
All the negative headlines led to some advertisers saying “enough is enough”.
Shares in the social media company fell from $176.80 on Monday to around $159.30 by Friday night.
Facebook’s initial public offering in 2012 priced shares at $38 each, giving the company a market valuation of close to $104bn.
Following steady user growth and a dominant space in the digital advertising market ensuring revenues, Facebook’s share price climbed to $190 by February this year.
Brian Wieser, senior analyst at Pivotal Research, said he had one of the most negative outlooks for Facebook’s share price on Wall Street.
“I had a $152 price target on Facebook for 2018 – and that was before the events of this week”.
The Facebook founder tried to reassure users “the most important actions to prevent this from happening again today we have already taken years ago.”
However, Passion Capital tech investor Eileen Burbidge, who is also on the Prime Minister’s Business Advisory Group, said Facebook’s reassurance to users and clients took too long.
Cambridge Analytica is at the centre of a row over whether it used the personal data of millions of Facebook users to sway the outcome of the US 2016 presidential election and the UK Brexit referendum.
“Some people are using the term ‘political manipulation’.
“They [Facebook] assumed they had already taken care of this… as they had already changed their terms of service, for example,” Mrs Burbidge said.
In Mr Zuckerberg’s online statement he offered a timeline of how Facebook’s data permission agreements with users and other companies had changed since the 2014 personality quiz app was able to scrape data from quiz takers and their contacts without their expressed permission.
Mrs Burbidge said there may need to be new regulation over political campaigning “which really hasn’t kept up with social media”. (Excerpts from BBC)
