After a year of privacy scandals, Facebook’s stock ended the year lower than the previous one for the first time since its debut on the public market in 2012.
Facebook is bidding farewell to a year plagued by privacy scandals and internal turmoil. On the last trading day of 2018, the stock closed at $131.09 per share, down 25.7 percent for the year. The stock ended the year lower than the previous one for the first time since its debut on the public market in 2012.
In 2018, a series of events soured public opinion on a company that has long prided itself on connecting people to one another. A movement to #deletefacebook trended on rival social media platforms, the company’s top executives were asked to testify in front of legislators from around the globe and the heads of two of Facebook’s most successful brands, Instagram and WhatsApp, stepped down. Investors took notice. Facebook’s market cap closed 2018 around $376 billion compared to nearly $513 billion the previous year.
Prior to some of the major privacy revelations, Facebook’s stock hit its first speed bump of the year in January after announcing changes to its News Feed that would prioritize content from users‘ friends and family over brands they follow. Facebook’s stock plunged 4 percent the day after the announcement after CEO Mark Zuckerberg warned investors to expect engagement to decline slightly as a result of the change.
The stock really began to tumble in March when a whistleblower revealed that U. K.-based political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica collected the data of more than 50 million Facebook users without their permission and used it to target voters for Donald Trump’s campaign in the 2016 U.
