Twitter Hammered, Shares Plummet As They Fight Fake Accounts And Spam
It’s been a bad week for social media this week, with Twitter Inc. taking a hard hit on the nose in the way of both the loss of active users and plummeting shares. The social media site’s stocks sold off this morning after they announced the loss of an estimated 1 million users during the last three months.
The company posted a better than anticipated revenue but warned that numbers could continue to plummet as it continues to delete fake accounts and reign in spam. In fact, they claimed that the monthly numbers for its users could easily fall to “mid-single-digit millions” in the period of third quarter reporting.
Twitter’s hard line on abuses, hate, and online trolling is reportedly hurting the social media’s reputation with investors, causing them to bail, reports the Associated Press, leading to the falling shares. At the opening bell, the social media giant saw more than 17 percent of its share value drop.
The drop for the micro-blogging service’s shares came a day after rival, and other significant social media player, Facebook Inc., saw a post-earnings massacre, with their stocks tanking at nearly 19 percent on Thursday. Facebook’s 19 percent drop in shares amounts to the biggest loss in a day that has ever been experienced by a single company in the entire history of the United States’s stock market.
Twitter has been criticized for allowing trolls, hate, and abuse to go on for too long on its platform. Lately, though, the social media started cracking down and deactivating accounts or giving less visibility to those that violate its terms of service.
The Twitter network claimed in May that their systems determined that more than 9 million of its accounts per week were most likely automated ones or spam. That figure is “up from 6.4 million in December 2017,” the company disclosed.
Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, said this about the purge in the following prepared statement.
“We want people to feel safe freely expressing themselves and have launched new tools to address problem behaviors that distort and distract from the public conversation.”
Twitter shares plunge in premarket trading after tech firm reports drop in monthly users and warns of further declines https://t.co/rLhVobQvT1
— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) July 27, 2018
The total of suspended Twitter accounts in May and June stand at 70 million, according to the Washington Post. Additionally, since the last quarter in 2017, the social media company suspended 56 million clandestine accounts.
Twitter is ridding itself of suspicious accounts like mad, but on the other hand, it is trying its best to convince users that it is the best platform out there for social media. Meanwhile, Facebook eclipses Twitter in the way of users with 2.23 billion their 335 million. Facebook’s various apps also snatch in over 1 billion users.
Jack Dorsey has struggled to develop a strategy to attract users to Twitter, while both Facebook and other popular social media network, Snapchat, race ahead in the battle for user’s allegiance and attention.
