As Elon Musk continues to gut Twitter due to his own hubris, it’s odd to hear of a new — potentially helpful — feature coming to the platform. The social media platform announced this week the integration of tickers for stock and crypto prices in search results and tweets.
The company referred to the feature as $Cashtags in a tweet from Twitter Business. Users can enter the symbol of a major stock, ETF, or cryptocurrency with a dollar sign in the front (e.g. $BTC for Bitcoin) directly into the search bar to be greeted with a chart that displays the price chart and current valuation of the stock/crypto. Users can also click directly on the dollar sign notation if they see it in a tweet, which will bring them to the same display.
$Cashtags, now with data 📈
👀 $SPY 👇 pic.twitter.com/XgOK6gf02E
— Twitter Business (@TwitterBusiness) December 21, 2022
According to CoinDesk, Twitter is not building the feature completely from scratch, but will instead rely on help from a company called TradingView. Likewise, after accessing the price chart, a button can take you to a live price chart of the stock or crypto’s value on Robinhood. Twitter’s collab with Robinhood has some users worried although it’s unclear whether the two have formed any formal partnership with this new launch.
“You really partnered with RobinHood on this?” wrote user BTan121. “Let me take a wild guess on what happens with the data.”
“How much is robinhood paying y’all for this,” tweeted ParikPatelCFA.
“Only problem is, Robinhood scammed everyone during The Gamestop Pump. We won’t forget this,” said JasonRobergeVA.
Robinhood is a financial services company, best known for its stock trading app of the same name. The company had a huge hand in making stock trading more accessible, but is also no stranger to massive controversy. In January 2021, day traders saw an opportunity in GameStop stock being a lucrative target, taking to the subreddit r/WallStreetBets to express their enthusiasm and get other traders on board. The GameStop stock continued to balloon over the following days, until Robinhood limited trading. This decision is the antithesis of the company, which encourages free trading for the small investor — it’s called Robinhood for God’s sake.
This is unacceptable.
We now need to know more about @RobinhoodApp’s decision to block retail investors from purchasing stock while hedge funds are freely able to trade the stock as they see fit.
As a member of the Financial Services Cmte, I’d support a hearing if necessary. https://t.co/4Qyrolgzyt
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) January 28, 2021
The company naturally faced a ton of backlash and even calls for government action in the wake of GameStopGate, while the notion that the company could turn trading on and off at will was exposed. As such, user scepticism about Twitter using Robinhood as part of this new feature — especially since the former is being held together with metaphorical duct tape — is natural.