BAD week for social media continues
Cracking down on hate, abuse and online trolls is also hurting Twitter’s standing with investors.
The company’s stock plunged more than 20 per cent Friday after it reported a decline in its monthly users and warned that the number could fall further in the coming months.
The drop in share value comes one day after Facebook lost 19 per cent of its value — its worst trading day since Facebook went public in 2012.
Twitter says it’s putting the longterm stability of its platform above user growth. That leaves investors seemingly unable to value what the biggest companies in the sector, which rely on their potential user reach, are worth.
Twitter had 335 million monthly users in the quarter, below the 339 million Wall Street was expecting, and down slightly from 336 million in the first quarter. That overshadowed a strong monthly user growth of 3 per cent compared with the previous year.
The company said its monthly user number could continue to fall in the “mid-single-digit millions” in the third quarter.
Long criticized for allowing bad behaviour to run rampant on its platform, Twitter has begun to crack down, banning accounts that violate its terms and making others less visible.
Twitter is now attempting to rein in the worst offenders after years as one of the Wild West corners of the internet.
At the same time, it must convince people it’s the go-to platform in social media, even though it is dwarfed right now by Facebook.
Facebook has more than 2.23 billion users while its apps WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger each have over 1 billion.
Twitter on Friday reiterated its efforts to “to invest in improving the health of the public conversation” on its platform, making the “long-term health” of its service a priority over short-term metrics such as user numbers.
As part of these efforts, Twitter said that, as of May, its systems identified and challenged more than 9 million accounts per week that are potentially spam or automated, up from 6.4 million in December 2017.
A Washington Post report put the total number of suspended accounts in May and June at 70 million. The Associated Press also found that Twitter suspended 56 million such accounts in the last quarter of 2017. While Twitter maintains that most of these accounts were dormant and thus not counted in the monthly user figure, the company also warned that its cleanup efforts could affect its counted user base without giving specific numbers.
“We want people to feel safe freely expressing themselves and have launched new tools to address problem behaviours that distort and distract from the public conversation,” CEO Jack Dorsey said in a prepared statement.
Twitter’s second-quarter net income hit $100 million, after a loss last year during the same period. It’s the company’s third profit in a row, the third it has ever posted.