FINRA has long regulated and limited the ability of broker/dealers to communicate with the public. One of their missions is to protect the investing public from unscrupulous securities brokers. Twitter is a communications tools and any messages posted to Twitter will need to be in compliance.
It was inevitable that we would see a FINRA regulated party make a mistake using Twitter. The time has come.
FINRA also found that during eight months in 2009, the registered representative maintained a Twitter account and had more than 1,400 followers. Without notifying a principal of her employer firm, the registered representative posted 32 “tweets” related to a particular security. The tweets were unbalanced, overly positive and often predicted an imminent price increase. In the tweets, the representative failed to disclose that she and her family held a significant number of shares of the security. FINRA concluded that this conduct violated NASD Rules 2210 (communications with the public) and IM-2210-1 (guidelines to ensure that communications with the public are not misleading), and FINRA Rule 2010 (ethical standards).
To me, this sounds exactly like the behavior FINRA is trying to prevent by imposing Rule 2210 on financial representatives.
I don’t want to overstate the effect of this Twitter failure on the discipline. The registered representative was doing some other things in violation of the rules. I would guess that once a registered representative is under investigation FINRA takes a look at that person’s social networking activity to see if they have been doing other bad things.
Sources:
- FINRA Quarterly Disciplinary Review July 2011 (.pdf)
- Unbalanced Tweeting: FINRA Sanctions Broker for Twitter Usage by Joel beck in the BD Law Blog
- FINRA’s Guide to the Internet – prior post on Compliance Building
Image is 2008wmonroe by Liza P
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