disseminate information if certain requirements are met. As with company websites, investors’ access to the chosen social media platform must not be restricted and investors must be notified about which social media will be used to disseminate information. Materiality and public record The rule only prohibits private disclosure of material information. This means that the company disclose "seemingly inconsequential data" which might prove consequential in a mosaic. The company can inform also analysts of public record information without necessarily violating the rule. Applicability The rule only applies to certain groups such as securities market professionals and shareholders, which allows the company to continue providing necessary information to business partners. Background Before the 1990s, most individual investors followed the progress of their stock holdings by receiving phone calls from their broker, by reading annual or quarterly reports mailed to them by the company, by reading news in newspapers or financial publications, or by calling the company with questions. Most investors relied primarily upon full service brokers, such as Merrill Lynch, for trading advice. By 1999, individual investors became more aware of quarterly analyst conference calls, where a company's management would disclose the results of the quarter and answer analyst questions about the company's past performance and future prospects. At the time, most companies did not allow small investors to attend their calls. One small investor, Mark Coker, founded a company called Bestcalls.com, a directory of conference calls open to all investors, to help persuade public companies to open up all their calls ( and ). Coker campaigned in the press to educate individual investors about the benefits of conference call attendance as a fundamental research tool, and worked constructively with the SEC to educate them about the pervasiveness of selective disclosure on earnings conference calls. At the same time, companies such as Onstream Media, Broadcast.com, Vcall.com, Shareholder.com and Thomson Financial (now Thomson Reuters) offered webcasting technology and services that made it more practical, and more affordable, for companies to allow all investors to listen in. In December 1999, the SEC proposed Regulation FD. Thousands of individual investors wrote the SEC and voiced their support for the regulation. But support was not unanimous. Large institutional investors, accustomed to benefiting from selectively disclosed material information, fought vigorously against the proposed regulation. They argued that fair disclosure would lead to less disclosure. In October 2000, the SEC promulgated Regulation FD. Enforcement In 2017, the