SEC Investigates Netflix CEO Reed Hastings Over Facebook Posting

alexander_686 writes "The SEC is investigating Netflix CEO Reed Hastings over one of his Facebook postings. The agency is questioning his July 1 Facebook posting, seen by 200,000 followers, in which he said customers watched 'over 1 billion hours' of videos on Netflix in June. He had previously posted on his company blog that members were viewing 'nearly a billion hours per month.' From the article: '“We think the fact of 1 billion hours of viewing in June was not ‘material’ to investors, and we had blogged a few weeks before that we were serving nearly 1 billion hours per month,” Hastings said in the filing today. “We remain optimistic this can be cleared up quickly through the SEC’s review process.”'"

Re:What?

[sribe]

They're trying to protect the rest of the investors who DON'T have an equal opportunity to look at those bits of data.

Yep. All the investors who don't have an internet connection, or don't know how to access Facebook, or WHO DON'T FOLLOW NETFLIX CLOSELY ENOUGH TO KNOW THAT THE CEO HAS A FACEBOOK PAGE. Yeah, because those investors need to be protected from, uhm, you know, something or other.

...that 200,000 people had access to this Facebook page, so it feels more "public" than "private."

Yes, I see that we actually agree on this. I just wanted to pile on the mockery of the SEC's asinine position. Meanwhile, the hedge firms and their blogger sock puppets manipulate the shit out of volatile stocks, and firms use HFT to try engage in manipulation that would require 1,000x their capital in actual trades, and the SEC does absolutely nothing. Worthless sacks of shit...

Re:Wow, such a minor quibble too.

[drinkypoo]

OK, where's the URL to the post?

AFAICT the post in question has been taken down, but Reed Hasting's fb feed is at https://www.facebook.com/reed1960 [facebook.com] and it is public, so you don't need to log in to read it.

Re:Wow, such a minor quibble too.

[Bill_the_Engineer]

Methinks that the SEC has a genuine case here.

Me thinks that the SEC is biased toward the institutional investors.

You can't reasonably count on investors to follow the CEOs and CFOs of companies they invest in on corporate blogs and news feeds, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Linked In, and wherever else. Information with material value to investors needs to be made available to all investors at the same time through the usual channels: SEC filings, letters to the investors, and press releases.

Except in this case your investor is an institutional investor (eg. Hedge funds, money markets, etc.) who already possess a huge advantage over the individual investor. In this one case, the individual investor may have had an advantage against an institutional investor since the CEO used a nontraditional forum to disclose his excitement about reaching a corporate landmark. Information that has little to do with the actual financial well being of the company, and the disclosure amounts to the difference between "near 1 billion hours" that was disclosed earlier to "over 1 billion hours" that was disclosed on Facebook.

I think this is an over enforcement by the SEC. The cynic in me believes that SEC is acting on behalf of some entities that make up the traditional disclosure media that fear the shift to more direct communications with individual investors.