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Twitter (NYSE:TWTR) had its price target cut by Citigroup from $45.00 to $36.00 in a research report report published on Wednesday, December 18th, BenzingaRatingsTable reports. They currently have a neutral rating on the social networking companys stock.

A number of other research analysts have also recently weighed in on the stock. Pivotal Research reaffirmed a buy rating and issued a $35.00 price objective on shares of Twitter in a report on Thursday, October 24th. Jefferies Financial Group reaffirmed a hold rating and issued a $38.00 price objective (down previously from $44.00) on shares of Twitter in a report on Friday, October 25th. Mizuho cut their price objective on shares of Twitter from $35.00 to $31.00 and set an underperform rating for the company in a report on Friday, October 25th. Macquarie cut their price objective on shares of Twitter from $43.00 to $36.00 and set a neutral rating for the company in a report on Friday, October 25th. Finally, Robert W. Baird cut their target price on shares of Twitter from $40.00 to $39.00 in a research note on Thursday, October 24th. Seven equities research analysts have rated the stock with a sell rating, twenty-five have given a hold rating and eleven have given a buy rating to the companys stock. Twitter currently has a consensus rating of Hold and a consensus target price of $36.36.

NYSE TWTR traded down $0.44 on Wednesday, reaching $32.78. 11,149,154 shares of the companys stock traded hands, compared to its average volume of 12,626,526. Twitter has a fifty-two week low of $28.63 and a fifty-two week high of $45.85. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.28, a quick ratio of 8.69 and a current ratio of 8.69. The stock has a 50 day moving average price of $31.30 and a 200-day moving average price of $36.52. The firm has a market cap of $25.66 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 59.60, a P/E/G ratio of 2.66 and a beta of 0.57.

Twitter (NYSE:TWTR) last released its quarterly earnings data on Thursday, October 24th. The social networking company reported $0.17 earnings per share for the quarter, beating analysts consensus estimates of $0.10 by $0.07. Twitter had a net margin of 47.67% and a return on equity of 6.07%. The company had revenue of $824.00 million during the quarter, compared to analysts expectations of $875.21 million. During the same quarter in the previous year, the company earned $0.21 earnings per share. The firms revenue for the quarter was up 8.7% on a year-over-year basis. As a group, equities research analysts anticipate that Twitter will post 1.98 EPS for the current fiscal year.

In other Twitter news, CAO Robert Kaiden sold 9,685 shares of the stock in a transaction that occurred on Friday, November 1st. The shares were sold at an average price of $29.72, for a total transaction of $287,838.20. The transaction was disclosed in a document filed with the SEC, which can be accessed through the SEC website. Also, insider Vijaya Gadde sold 8,332 shares of the stock in a transaction that occurred on Monday, October 21st. The stock was sold at an average price of $39.66, for a total transaction of $330,447.12. The disclosure for this sale can be found here. Over the last 90 days, insiders sold 70,993 shares of company stock worth $2,211,668. Company insiders own 2.65% of the companys stock.

A number of institutional investors have recently added to or reduced their stakes in the business. E&G Advisors LP acquired a new stake in Twitter during the 4th quarter worth approximately $266,000. Addison Capital Co lifted its holdings in Twitter by 1.6% during the 4th quarter. Addison Capital Co now owns 112,877 shares of the social networking companys stock worth $3,618,000 after buying an additional 1,750 shares in the last quarter. Sanders Morris Harris LLC acquired a new stake in Twitter during the 4th quarter worth approximately $1,841,000. Carroll Financial Associates Inc. lifted its holdings in Twitter by 238.5% during the 4th quarter. Carroll Financial Associates Inc. now owns 1,706 shares of the social networking companys stock worth $54,000 after buying an additional 1,202 shares in the last quarter. Finally, Accurate Investment Solutions Inc. lifted its holdings in Twitter by 2,012.0% during the 4th quarter. Accurate Investment Solutions Inc. now owns 2,112 shares of the social networking companys stock worth $68,000 after buying an additional 2,012 shares in the last quarter. Institutional investors own 71.67% of the companys stock.

About Twitter

Twitter, Inc operates as a platform for public self-expression and conversation in real time. The company offers various products and services, including Twitter, a platform that allows users to consume, create, distribute, and discover content; and Periscope, a mobile application that enables user to broadcast and watch video live with others.

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Twitter (NYSE:TWTR) PT Lowered to $36.00 at Citigroup - Riverton Roll

Facebook has announced plans to remove any videos doctored using artificial intelligence (AI) from its social networking platforms ahead of the upcoming US presidential election.

The videos, known as deepfakes, are modified to look real and have been shown to be highly convincing and difficult to debunk online.

In a blog postthis week, Facebook admitted thatdeepfakes present a significant challenge to technology and social networking sites, but promised to tackle all types of manipulated media.

Deepfakes are videos in which AI has been used to superimpose the face of a person onto the body of another.

The controversial practice first made headlines in 2017, when internet users published pornographic videos featuring the likenesses of female celebrities including Taylor Swift and Katy Perry.

Most of the sites hosting the videos subsequently removed the content and banned them from their platforms, but fake footage featuring high-profile figures from a variety of different fields has continued to spread online.

While these videos are still rare on the internet, they present a significant challenge for our industry and society as their use increases, writes Monika Bickert, vice president of global policy management at Facebook, in the blog post.

The social media giant, which also owns Instagram, has pledged to removed doctored videos if it wasnt obvious to an average person that they have been edited, or if they give a false impression that the subject of the video has said or done something that they have not.

There are people who engage in media manipulation in order to mislead, warns Bickert in the blog.

Banning deepfake videos is part of Facebooks attempts to get ahead of a wave of new misleading media and content expected to be shared in the run-up to the election in the US in November.

Some critics argue that Facebooks new policy does not go far enough. For instance, the ban on deepfakes will not apply to videos deemed to be parody or satire.

The social network was criticised last summer for refusing to remove a viral video of US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi that was doctored to make it sound like she was drunkenly slurring her words.

In a statement toReuters this week, Facebook said: The doctored video of Speaker Pelosi does not meet the standards of this policy and would not be removed. Only videos generated by artificial intelligence to depict people saying fictional things will be taken down.

So-called shallow fakes videos made using conventional editing tools and not edited by AI will also still be allowed.

To date, there have been no major examples of deepfake content being uploaded to Facebook platforms that would break the new rules.AsThe Guardiannotes, themost damaging examples of manipulated media in recent years have tended to be created using simple video-editing tools.

But computer scientist William Tunstall-Pedoe, whose AI companyEvi invented the technology behindAmazons Alexa, told the BBC that Facebook deserved credit for trying to tackle the difficult area.

The fact the video is fake and intended to be misleading is the key thing for me, he said. Whether sophisticated AI techniques are used or less sophisticated techniques isnt relevant.

The multinational is still dealing with the fallout of being accused of allowing the spread of disinformation during the 2016 presidential election and the 2018 US midterms.

AndFacebooks reputation has taken a furtherhit from its involvement in the Cambridge Analytica data harvesting scandal and controversies over targeted political advertising.

The resulting pressure from lawmakers, journalists and activists to crack down on the spread of misleading or false information may be a major factor in the new ban on deepfakes.

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Why everyones talking about Facebooks deepfake ban - The Week UK

Popular messaging service WhatsApp will soon stop working on millions of smartphones.

From February 1, older operating systems on Apple and Android devices will no longer be supported by the hugely-popular app.

iPhone users running on iOS 8 or earlier and Android customers with versions 2.3.7 and older will be locked out next month.

This comes after WhatsApp stopped working on all Windows Phone operating systems on December 31.

If users want to save their data before they are locked out of the app, they need to go to 'Group Info' and 'Export Chat'.

WhatsApp is owned by Facebook, who paid A$27 billion (US$19 billion) for the messaging service in 2014.

In a blog post titled "A Privacy-Focused Vision for Social Networking" published in March 2019, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg wrote about his intention to integrate Instagram direct messages, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp.

"In a few years, I expect future versions of Messenger and WhatsApp to become the main ways people communicate on the Facebook network," Zuckerberg wrote.

"We're focused on making both of these apps faster, simpler, more private and more secure, including with end-to-end encryption."

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WhatsApp to stop working on millions of smartphones - 9News

John Fea, Opinion contributor Published 4:00 a.m. ET Jan. 11, 2020

Trump mocked his enemies, trafficked in half-truths, instilled fear and expressed zero humility. My fellow evangelicals loved every minute of it.

I have spent my entire adult life in the evangelical community. I had a born-again experience when I was 16and I never looked back. I currently teach history at a Christian college with evangelical roots. As a historian, I study American evangelicalism.

But I have never seen anything like what I witnessed last Friday night as I watched Donald Trump speak to a few thousand of his evangelical supporters at El Rey Jesus, a largely Hispanic megachurch in Miami, during the kickoff to his Evangelicals for Trump campaign.

It is no coincidence that this rally took place two weeks after Christianity Today, the historic voice of moderate evangelicalism, called for Trumps removal from office. The magazines editor, Mark Galli, described Trumps character as grossly immoral and warned his fellow evangelicals that their ardent support of the president was damaging to their Christian witness.

While the Evangelicals for Trump campaign had been in the works for several weeks prior to Gallis editorial, it is hard to see the decision to schedule the kickoff event for Jan.3 as anything but damage control. Even the smallest crack in his evangelical support especially in swing states like Florida could result in a Trump loss in 2020.

BeforeTrumps speechFriday night, several evangelical leaders laid their hands on the president and prayed for him. Apostle Guillermo Maldonado, the pastor of El Rey Jesus, prayed that Trump would fulfill his role as a new King Cyrus, the Old Testament Persian ruler who released the Jews from captivity and allowed them to rebuild Jerusalem.

Paula White, a preacher of the Prosperity Gospel (God blesses the faithful with financial and physical health), prayed against the demonic forces, presumably Democrats, trying to undermine Trumps presidency.

"Evangelicals for Trump" event in Miami, on Jan. 3, 2020.(Photo: Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images)

As Trump took the podium, the evangelicals in attendance, many wearing pro-Trump clothing and Make America Great Again hats, began screaming USA, USA, USA. It was clear from the outset that this event would be no different from any other Trump rally. It didnt matter that the room was filled with born-again Christians. Trump only knows how to sing one note, and it is music to the ears of his evangelical supporters.

Trump and the 'Prosperity Gospel': He's selling false promises to credulous evangelical Christians

Trump bragged about the crowd size, adding that there were thousandsof people outside trying to get in. He called the Evangelicals for Trump movement the greatest grass roots movement in American history. He reminded everyone that he took the life of Qasem Soleimani. You Cant Always Get What You Want, the Rolling Stones anthem that has become Trumps theme song, blared over the church loudspeaker in Spanish when he finished his speech. Maybe Onward Christian Soldiers would have been more appropriate.

Trump painted himself as a president who is protecting American evangelicals from those on the political left who want to punish people of faith and destroy religion in America. One of the evangelical Christians in the audience screamed Pocohontas, a racist reference to Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Trump was visibly pleased.

Trump the strongman was on display. Like autocratic leaders before him, he stirred fear among his people and offered them safety under his regime.

At one point in his speech, Trump rattled off the names of the Fox News personalities who carry his water on cable television. The crowd roared as the president read this laundry list of conservative media pundits.

This rhetorical flourish was all very appropriate on such an occasion because Fox News, more than anything else, including the Bible and the spiritual disciplines, has formed and shaped the values of so many people in the sanctuary. Trumps staff knows this.Why else would they put such a roll call in the speech?

At times, it seemed like Trump was putting a new spin on the heroes of the faith described in the New Testament book of Hebrews. Instead of Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Joseph, Moses, David, and Samuel, we got Sean (Hannity),Laura (Ingraham), Tucker (Carlson), and the hosts of Fox and Friends.

Message to evangelicals: Impeachment is about Donald Trump. It's not an attack on you.

I am used to this kind of thing from Trump, but I was stunned when I witnessed evangelical Christians those who identify with the good news of Jesus Christ raising their hands in a posture of worship as Trump talked about socialism and gun rights.

I watched my fellow evangelicals rising to their feet and pumping their fists when Trump said he would win reelection in 2020.

Trump spent the evening mocking his enemies, trafficking in half-truths in order to instill fear in people whom God commands to fear not, and proving that he is incapable of expressing anything close to Christian humility.

His evangelical supporters loved every minute of it. On Friday night, Christians who claim to be citizens of the Kingdom of God went to church, cheered the depraved words of a president, and warmly embraced his offer of political power. Such a display by evangelicals is unprecedented in American history.

I usually get angry when members of my tribe worship at the feet of Trump. This time I just felt sad.

John Fea teaches history at Messiah College in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. He is the author of "Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump," which was published Jan. 7.

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DO NOT PUBLISH 'Evangelicals for Trump' was an awful display by supposed citizens of the Kingdom of God - USA TODAY

Was it a birth certificate? You tell me, he told ABC News in 2013. Some people say that was not his birth certificate.

That same year, Nunberg arranged for Trump to make his Levin show debut, preparing a memo to familiarize Mr. Trump with Mark Levin, he wrotedeploying tried-and-true ways to pique Trumps interest. Nunberg emphasized Levins ratings history (In the first 18 months on the air, the program jumped to #1 in the time slot), the company he kept (considers Sean Hannity his best friend), his reach (books Liberty and Tyranny and Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America sold more than a million copies, Nunberg noted), and his compensation (a reported annual salary of $12.5 million a year). Nunberg mentioned, too, that what he said on the air often was disseminated on a variety of websites like TheRightScoop.com. People, in other words, some people, many people, a lot of people, were listening to what Levin was saying.

Armed with this advance work, the memo as well as the emails, Trump fit in well with Levin. In addition to shilling for the upcoming season of The Celebrity ApprenticeTrace Adkins, La Toya Jackson, Dennis RodmanTrump delivered to Levins listeners what they wantedwhich essentially was Levins ideas, studiously collected by Nunberg, consumed by Trump and regurgitated back to the host.

If the Republicans are going to win, Trump said, theyre going to have to break away from the Karl Roves of the world and, frankly, get more involvedyou know, the Tea Party, these people are great. Ive done some speeches in front of the Tea Party. They are great Americans, they love this country, they work so hard, and they have been so mistreated by the liberal media. They truly are not treated with proper respect.

And he landed especially hard on immigration and any notions of amnesty for undocumented immigrants.

I watched last night, he continued, referring to Obamas State of the Union that year, as Senator McCain and everybody were jumping up and down, you know, applaudingI never saw him move so fast, you know, nice guy, but he jumped upand was applauding as soon as the immigration became a part of the discussion, a part of the speech.

Immigration, Trump said, will be the next thing, based on what Im watching.

Trump and Levin wrapped up by exchanging compliments.

Im extremely impressed with what youre doing, Levin said.

You just have a great show, Trump said. Im always listening.

Donald Trump, Levin told his listeners after Trump signed off. See that, folks? Very solid. Very conservative. To the right of the Republican establishment. Strong supporter of the Tea Party. Im telling you. Ive been watching this. Ive been listening. People have been sending me his tweets.

There was a reason for that. Hes putting stuff out there, Nunberg told me of Trumps tweets at the time, some of which Nunberg was suggesting, that sounds like Mark Levin.

In the few months before his interview with Levin:

And in the few months after:

This ear-to-the-proverbial-ground political ramp-up wasnt limited to Levin and talk radio. It was around this time as well that Trump began to give more and more talks on the pre-presidential hustings, GOP chicken dinners in places like Iowa and New Hampshire.

He talked to Pat Caddell about what he was picking up on the trail. He would put forth his position or his feelings, and he would judge the level of the response to it, and that helped him organize, I suppose to whatever degree it was organized, his views about issues, Caddell told me in 2018. Things he said that didnt go over disappeared. Things that did stayed.

Twitter, too, increasingly served a similar purpose.

He glommed onto it like it was an oxygen source, Caddell explained. And he would tweet what he believed, and people would retweet or answer or whatever, and it was kind of his ongoing focus group.

He loved it, Nunberg said. He doesnt trust the political people who do the focus groups. Instead: What are we getting the most retweets on?

In 2014 and 15well before Trump came down the escalator and announced his intention to runNunberg sent Trump nearly daily updates of snippets of news and possible topics and wordings for tweets. At the tops of the documents he showed the number of Trumps Twitter followers ticking up (a snapshot from December of 2014: 2,751,488 2,753,548 2,757,190 ) and the number of days left until the GOP primary debate at the Reagan library and the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primaries ticking down.

A month into the presidential campaign, after the Vietnam-avoiding Trump insulted McCain by saying he was not a war hero and that he liked people who werent captured, he refused to apologize. That, Nunberg said, partly was because of what he had internalized by listening to Levin. Nunberg told Trump it was going to help him. (It certainly didnt hurt him.) He said, Why? Nunberg said. And I said, Because our people despise John McCain. They despise the fact that McCain hides behind his military record to shit on Republicans and you cant criticize him on anything because of his military record. I said, John McCainhe is hated almost as much as Barack Obama on talk radio. I said, He might as well be Barack Obama on talk radio.

Talk radio led the way. Trump followed.

Theoretically, Trump could have changed. As successful as this pattern of behavior had been in the years preceding his run and during the campaign itselfhe was, after all, elected presidentTrump could have adjusted once he took office, having at his disposal, suddenly and quite unexpectedly, the worlds preeminent intelligence-gathering apparatus. But nosticking to that gossip kind of mentality, said ODonnell, the casino exec, Trump has continued to mine Twitter, plucking what he wants, very comfortable with half thoughts, always looking for tidbits of information that he can use to his advantage.

He sees the ones that are the most popular, former Fox News anchor Eric Bolling, identified by Time as someone who speaks regularly to Trump, told the magazine in June of 2018, and getting the most [of the] zeitgeist, most attention on social media.

And then? The last and most important piece of this by now almost rote process?

He repeats it, Bolling said.

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Trumps Art of the Steal - POLITICO