Facebook’s shares were on track for their worst fall in more than five years on Monday, dropping 7 per cent and wiping about $35bn off the market value of the world’s largest social network as a backlash intensified over claims it had been used to harvest the data of millions of US voters.
EU lawmakers joined their UK and US counterparts by saying they would investigate reports that Cambridge Analytica, a data analysis firm, mined the personal data of 50m users to create profiles to target them in elections. The reports in The New York Times and The Observer say the company broke Facebook’s rules by using data collected solely for research.
The fall in Facebook shares, which were down to $172.69 by mid-morning in New York, spread across the so-called Fangs — a group of large tech companies that have rallied sharply in recent years. Amazon, Netflix and Apple were all more than 2 per cent lower while Google’s parent Alphabet was down 3.6 per cent.