Why Meta Platforms Stock Dropped Today

Shares of Meta Platforms (NASDAQ: FB) -- the artist formerly known as Facebook -- tumbled 3.5% in Tuesday afternoon trading, as of 3:20 p.m. ET, after Reuters reported that Britain's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has ordered the company to divest itself of the popular GIF website Giphy. Facebook (as it was still known at the time) bought Giphy last year in a deal valued at $400 million, giving itself and its users potentially exclusive access to the company's library of GIFs (short for the Graphics Interchange Format files used to post short, animated images on social media sites). To date, neither Facebook nor its Meta Platforms parent company have prevented users of rival social networks such as TikTok or Twitter from accessing Giphy GIFs on their own sites.