Twitter may not have NPR anymore, but here’s what it just scored: a deal with crypto-and-stock-trading platform eToro that takes the social media firm a little deeper into the world of finance.
Israel-based eToro entered the U.S. market nearly five years ago—ironically around the time Jack Dorsey’s Twitter banned crypto ads; how times change—though it only started offering stock-investing services there at the start of 2022. Meanwhile, at the end of 2022 Twitter expanded its long-standing Cashtags feature so that, when users click on the $-prefixed symbols of major stocks or cryptocurrencies, they get to see pricing charts.
According to an eToro announcement today, the new partnership gives Twitter’s users live charts for a “hugely expanded” range of stocks, crypto coins, ETFs, and commodities—though, in practice, the launch has been a real bug fest. People are also able to click through to eToro’s platform, where they can set up an account and begin trading.
This is obviously a big deal for eToro, which seems to have taken the lead on sharing the news (Twitter CEO Elon Musk’s feed is currently fixated on publicly funded journalism). The trading platform has always differentiated itself with social features—its users have long been able to share their investment profiles with others—and now it gets a direct line into #FinTwitter.
It’s less clear how much Twitter will benefit. Does it get a significant amount of much-needed revenue from referring users to eToro? The latter won’t say, while the former responded to the question with its now-customary poop emoji. Does it take Twitter closer to Musk’s vision of a WeChat-rivaling “everything app”? Eh, call me when Twitter integrates payments.
Still, the eToro deal does expand Twitter’s functionality to a degree, and it will be interesting to see what other partnerships get unveiled in the near future.
Separately, but also in the stay-tuned realm, Europe’s privacy regulators (which band together in the European Data Protection Board, or EDPB) just dropped a juicy two-for-one.
The headline news is that the regulators say they’ve reached a binding decision about Ireland’s desire to block Meta’s Facebook and Instagram from transferring Europeans’ personal data to the U.S.—but they won’t say what that decision is yet. (Europe’s byzantine sausage-making process requires that the EDPB wait for Ireland’s Data Protection Commission [DPC] to announce its final decision, which is expected within the month.)
If the regulators have backed Ireland’s call to stop data transfers, Meta’s European business could be in a tough spot. The company will be in a race against time, hoping its lawyers can stave off implementation of the decision until the EU finalizes a new data-sharing deal with the U.S. that would provide a new legal basis for its transatlantic transfers. However, there’s still some resistance on the European side to that deal being signed, and Politico now also reports that the American side may hold things up with a review of EU countries’ own security practices, so this could get really tight for Zuck & Co.
The regulators also announced that they have set up a joint task force to coordinate their potential crackdowns on OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Because OpenAI doesn’t have an EU office, every EU privacy regulator gets to take a shot at the company (they would otherwise have to let the watchdog in the country of establishment take the lead, as with Meta and Ireland). So far, only Italy has banned ChatGPT, but things could get messy without coordination, hence today’s announcement, which I would not call good news for OpenAI.
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David Meyer
Data Sheet’s daily news section was written and curated by Andrea Guzman.
