Twitter played a role in Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse, shows research

Prior to Silicon Valley Bank’s March 10, 2023, collapse, conversations on Twitter among investors about the bank spiked – helping fuel the SVB bank run. As we explain in our new working paper, “Social media as a bank run catalyst,” those tweets also destabilized other financial institutions with weak balance sheets.

The number of tweets mentioning “SIVB,” the bank’s stock ticker, increased sharply on March 9 around 9 a.m EST. That was roughly two and a half hours before tweets mentioning “SVB” or “Silicon Valley Bank,” which were part of a more general-interest discussion, began.

That spike in investor tweets coincided with the rapid drop in the bank’s stock price on March 9, which continued in after-hours trading and before the market opened the next morning.