Twitter’s eToro deal gives a boost to #FinTwitter, but the deeper benefits remain fuzzy

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. 

NEWSWORTHY

Amazon’s push into generative A.I. Amazon Web Services announced Bedrock, a service that offers access to language models like Amazon’s own Titan, as well as those from AI21 Labs, Anthropic, and Stability AI. One Titan model can generate text while another will be useful for search applications. The cloud giant says Bedrock is now available in a “limited preview,” and hasn’t disclosed the cost of the service yet.

Google wants judge to toss antitrust case. Google will try to convince a federal judge on Thursday that the U.S. antitrust case over its search engine dominance should be dismissed. The Justice Department alleges that Google uses exclusionary distribution agreements with Apple’s Safari browser and Mozilla’s Firefox to steer consumer search queries to its search engine, which handles about 90% of searches worldwide. The judge’s decision on whether the case should go to trial is expected this spring or summer, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Regulators object to Broadcom’s VMware deal. The European Commission says Broadcom’s plan to acquire cloud computing company VMware has the potential to limit competition for a couple of hardware components that interoperate with VM’s software. This comes after an investigation of the deal opened in December last year over those concerns, Reuters reports. But Broadcom isn’t showing any signs of worry, saying it expects to close the $61 billion deal this fiscal year.

ON OUR FEED

“Maybe people need to grow up. Just accept that I’m not like Santa Claus. I’m not a magic elf who posts.”

—Paul Dochney, the man behind the Dril Twitter account in an interview with The Ringer. His rise to internet fame started with posts as “gigantic drill” on a comedy website in the 2000s called Something Awful.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

Elon Musk says legacy check marks will be gone on 4/20, but there’s reason to be skeptical, by Chris Morris

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger calls China one of the firm’s ‘most important markets,’ even as the U.S. pushes to limit the export of chip technology to the country, by Nicholas Gordon

Warren Buffett says the threat of war was a ‘consideration’ in his decision to dump the bulk of his $4 billion stake in chipmaker giant TSMC, by Christiaan Hetzner

Billionaire mogul Barry Diller has some advice for the media about A.I.: Sue, by Prarthana Prakash

Elon Musk defends jobs bloodbath at Twitter after culling four out of every five workers: ‘This company was going to die,’ by Christiaan Hetzner

BEFORE YOU GO

A new map of dark matter. Using data from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) in Chile, scientists have made a map of dark matter’s distribution across a quarter of the sky. It’s a detailed look at the dark matter that makes up most of the universe but which is difficult to observe since it doesn’t interact with light or other forms of electromagnetic radiation. The map also confirms Einstein’s theory of how massive structures grow and bend light over the life span of the universe. 

The dark matter was observed indirectly, using light from the cosmic microwave background as a backlight to silhouette the matter. “It’s a thrill to be able to see the invisible, to uncover this scaffold of dark matter that holds our visible star-filled galaxies,” said Jo Dunkley, who leads analysis for the telescope. A new telescope, capable of mapping the sky at almost 10 times the speed of the ACT, will begin operations in 2024.