 Dave Marcus here, New York correspondent for The Federalist. Very happy to be joined today by stock analyst Melissa Armo to discuss everybody's recent favorite company, Twitter.com, and what its future and past in the marketplace might look like. So Melissa, thanks for joining us today. Thanks for having me. So before we get into the more recent stuff, can you just give us a little bit of a background on the history of Twitter stock, sort of what its reputation has been, and what people who really watch the market closely like you have thought about it over the past several years? Well, the Twitter IPO came out a little over seven years ago in 2013. It first dropped when it came out, which was very similar to Facebook. Facebook stock when the IPO came out dropped too. But Facebook stock recovered very, very quickly. Twitter rallied after that at the end of 2013, made brand new all-time highs, almost got up to $75 a share, got around 74 and changed. That is the highest the stock has ever been. Whereas you have stocks like Facebook and Google, which owns YouTube, other social media platforms that have done much, much better as far as how the stock has performed since the IPOs have come out. So Twitter is different from the other platforms in reference to how the stock has reacted, especially when the market has been very bullish. When you have a market that has been climbing to brand new all-time highs for so many years and you don't have the stock following that, and you have other stocks in the sector continuing higher and in fact, driving the market higher, you have to question why the stock has not performed. It's been on the lower end of the performing stocks in that sector. So what's been the impact of, if any, of the recent things that have happened from banning the New York Post and now banning Trump to Twitter's pretty obvious engagement in the political world? Has that moved the stock at all or is that something that investors are taking into consideration? It's definitely moved the stock, particularly in the last two weeks from the Friday close before Trump was banned, the stock was over $50 a share. And then a Monday morning after that weekend, after they permanently banned President Trump from the platform and other conservatives too, the stock opened down around $40 some dollars. And so the stock has been dropping ever since then in the last five days. Now, where it opens this coming week, I don't know, but I personally think the stock is going to continue to have some more selling in it because people are concerned. They're concerned if Congress is going to regulate these social media platforms and they're concerned really if the bans are going to continue. When they're banning people, they're obviously taking away users, which isn't good because when you have a social media platform, you're trying to get as many users as possible. So clearly there's a balance here, right? Like Jack Dorsey and the powers that be at Twitter are obviously aware of what we're talking about, but it seems that they view it as being in their long-term interest to play this political role. And at least within the short term, they've had the success of, at least for a few days, getting parlor basically kicked off the internet. I mean, long-term, does it make sense for them to suffer these stock losses right now if it's going to secure them this sort of monopolistic position that they've had for so long going into the future? I mean, do you think that's part of their thinking here? Honestly, I don't know what they're thinking, but long-term, I don't see how that could benefit them if they lose people on the platform because how do these places make money? Often people don't understand how they make money. They make money strictly and solely based on advertising. Facebook owns Instagram. There's ads, like I have a company, the Stock Swoosh. I pay to have ads run on the social media platforms. Now, I've never paid for ads on Twitter. Why? Because I have more success running ads on YouTube. I have more success running ads on Facebook. These other platforms have really, really had a lot of success getting companies to advertise on them, whereas Twitter has not. Now, that is how Twitter makes money. So long-term, how could it possibly benefit the platform to throw people off the site? Or really, they're focusing really on getting conservatives off the site. In my opinion, that is what has happened recently in the last two weeks. And this is even going on back all of last 2020. This was leading up to it. In fact, I'm surprised that it took this long to ban the president on Twitter. I actually thought that he could have been banned before the election. So let's look at the broader trend, though, because Twitter's not the only company that's engaged with this. We just saw Lowe saying that it won't host a political fundraiser. We see all of the movement over the past few years towards woke corporatism. And I wonder from a market perspective, what do you and other investors and analysts make of that? What does this phenomenon do to a stock market that was supposedly really about money, not about social justice? You know, it's a catch 22 because you've seen a lot of corporate involvement in a social justice movement. It's not just with this banning, but even you saw that in 2020 with the Black Lives Matter movement during the riots. We saw a lot of these companies giving money to those other movements. So typically, companies usually will give money to both political sides, Democrat and Republican, but it's becoming more and more so where companies are making statements, making public statements, and they're really shunning almost half the country that may have different viewpoints. So personally, I don't think it's a good business decision, and the best decision probably is for companies to stay out of politics, but it doesn't seem to be that way. You say, why? Why are they doing that? Are they scared if they don't jump on board the woke bandwagon that they will lose so much, so many clients? Or really, is there just no reason for it? They're just doing it because everybody else is doing it. I really don't know, to be honest with you. I think the best great line is to stay out of it, and that's one of the reasons why I was so surprised, shocked actually why Amazon wanted to get involved with this. That was the most shocking thing of the last two weeks that Amazon, who had a Parlers platform, who was handling all of their data, decided to shut them down. I was so shocked because Jeff Bezos really has not gotten involved with political stuff. He's kept to the sidelines on it. Amazon is just a Megalodon company, a beast in the market, and for them to then decide to take a side was really, really shocking to me. It'd be interesting to see how that turns out. Do you think this has something to do with the fact that the tech industry has always been unique in terms of the way it has a vision for society? I was on Tucker Carlson the other night, and one of the points that I made to Tucker was that this is different than the railroads or Ma Belle, because those companies didn't have some dystopian vision of the future where everything changes. Big tech always has. Even going back to the 90s, if you watch a show Silicon Valley, they do a good job of teasing the tech world about this, that they've always viewed themselves as not just companies that are there to make money, but as companies that are there to transform the world. That's more of an abstract concept than a direct question, but I'm wondering what you make of that, and if you think that plays a role in these choices that they're making. Well, I think the problem is if the reasons that they're giving for the censorship or because of the violence and the violence, the violent tweets and all the threats or the reasons that the CEO of Twitter and Facebook said that they took Trump off the platform, the reasons that they're giving for it are not consistent across the board. What you have is they're actually taking sides against a huge massive amount of consumers that, again, would either pay for advertising or advertisers would go and get customers from. You don't want to do that as a business standpoint. It makes sense. It's fine if a culture of the company wants to be a certain way. Yes, you're right. They've always been that way. That's perfectly fine, but the problem is that it's not consistent across the board, and I think long-term it is not going to be good for these companies and for the performance, because what happens is people are angry now. People are angry that people are being banned. The best thing I think for the country is to have discussion. One of the nice things about living in New York, and you know this, you live in New York too, is that New York is a melting pot. There's everything and everything you could possibly have in New York in many different opinions, and even though New York is a blue stain and New York City is typically Democrat blue, lots of people talk and they have discussions that are open-minded about things, and that's one of the things that's so great about living in the city. When you shut that down, when you don't have discussions and the other side isn't willing to listen to you, and the other side is saying, we're writing, you're wrong, and that's the end of the story, I don't think it's good for the country, and I definitely don't think it's good for platforms to be doing that, because in fact it's not what they're supposed to be doing, and you look at them and it gets into sections from 30 log where you said, okay, well they're really a publisher, and then they're not a platform. The people that control, the people that create content and control content, create it and control it are the most powerful, powerful, powerful companies that are in this world. They create the narrative and they control the narrative. There's a few companies that do that, and they own a lot of things. A lot of people know what they are, but they own a lot of stuff out there. Those are the most powerful companies, so if that's what Twitter wants to become, if that's what Facebook wants to become, if that's what YouTube wants to become, that's very different than how the original companies were set up to be. Right, so one last question to take us out. I think I just saw, I haven't checked, I don't know if I can check right now, but I think I just saw on the news that Parler is back up. I still seem to be getting a network error, but apparently they're finding a workaround from this Amazon situation. Can you just take us out with a little bit of what you see as the future of companies like Parler or other ones that are going to try to step into this gap that Big Tech seems to be leaving for conservative voices? There was a lot of opportunity for them, but then again, you said, are they going to just get the conservative voices there? So you're going to have all the conservative voices then on Parler or other, any other sites that would come out as competition, and then you're going to have all the liberal voices on Twitter. So again, it's getting back to the idea of the melting pot and having a free discussion. If we're all going to get along, if we're all going to have unity, I don't see how that's going to happen if you have conservatives on one side and liberals on the other side. It's getting to the point where there's so different viewpoints that people don't want to listen to the other side because you have the left, the left over here and the right over here, and there's no middle ground anymore. I think it's a very difficult place for the country to be in. And if you're a CEO of a company, again, not a social media platform company, but one of these companies, like we're talking about Lowe's with the hotel and even some of the publishing companies out there that are not wanting to publish certain books now, you have to walk a really fine line because you're basically going to shove out half, no matter what choice you make, because they're going to get involved, you're going to shove out half of your customer base. And then you say, well, is the other customer base going to make up the difference of the profit of the customer base that I've decided that I'm going to ignore or pretend that I don't care about or actually say that I disagree with? Right. Right. Thank you so much. It's really brilliant analysis on a topic of the stock market that I really don't understand and I think a lot of people don't. So I appreciate you taking a little time to walk us through all of that. Thanks, David. Thanks for having me.