Green light to the use of Twitter or Facebook for corporate communications. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has in fact released a report that finally clears customs that companies can use social media such as Facebook and Twitter to announce key information in accordance with the Regulation Fair Disclosure (Regulation FD).
In practice it is a regulation that requires companies to offer the relevant information in a reasonably designed way to provide that information to the public in a broad and non-exclusive sense. The regulation Fd is therefore aimed at ensuring that all investors have the ability to access relevant information at the same time.
In its report, the US market supervisory authority therefore specified that the dissemination of information through social media may be carried out on condition that investors have been warned about which social channels will be used to disseminate corporate information.
“Most social media are perfectly suitable methods for communicating with investors – remarked George Canellos of the SEC – but not if access is limited or if investors do not know that this is where they need to go to get the latest news".
The pronouncement of the SEC comes after the controversy that erupted last summer over the dissemination of corporate information through Facebook by the CEO of Netflix, Reed Hastings, pushing the stock upwards. In the first instance, the SEC had turned on the lights to assess the possible impropriety of Hastings' work.
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