When President Trump announced sweeping tariffs this week, some of the biggest tech companies had obvious reasons for worry.

Apple, Dell, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard — which rely on hardware and global supply chains that are in the direct line of fire from tariffs — saw their shares go into free-fall. But there was another big tech company whose stock took a pummeling even though its core business has little to do with hardware: Meta.

Shares of the company, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, fell $52 to $531.62 on Thursday and were down again on Friday. In total, Meta shed a whopping 9 percent of its market capitalization on Thursday.

The reasons for Meta’s slide are less obvious. But close watchers of the social networking and metaverse company know it is just as vulnerable to Mr. Trump’s trade actions as some of its Silicon Valley peers, even if the details are more complicated. Here’s why.

What gives with Meta? It isn’t in the same hardware businesses as Apple or Nvidia.

That’s not entirely true, but for our purposes let’s look at Meta’s main business: digital advertising.

Meta rakes in billions of dollars in revenue by selling ads across Facebook and Instagram. Some of those advertisers are large brands, including Procter & Gamble, L’Oreal, McDonalds and Nestle. Those companies buy ads on Facebook for so-called brand awareness campaigns. Think of it as a way of nudging people to buy a specific product like Q-Tips instead of generic cotton swabs the next time they go to the store.