Twitter, Inc. (NYSE:TWTR) shares opened the market today down nearly 14 percent. According to Yahoo Finance, TWTR closed yesterday’s market at $42.94 a share and opened the market at $37.25, a share. What’s happening? Well, for starters, monthly Twitter users are down.
Monthly Twitter Users are Down
Twitter reported its second-quarter earnings before the market opened. Shares dropped as much as 18 percent in its pre-market trading when the report was first released to its investors.
In Q1 2018, Twitter reported that it held 36 million active monthly users. Twitter blames not moving to paid SMS carrier relationships and the GDPR regulations for its drop in active users.
In May and June, the company removed about 70 million accounts, but the CFO of Twitter, Ned Segal, claims that most of these accounts were not included in its reported metrics.
“We believe that Twitter’s value as a daily service is enhanced when the conversation on the platform is healthier, and people feel safe freely expressing themselves,” Jack Dorsey, Twitter CEO, told analysts on a conference call this morning.
Bot Accounts Plague Twitter
Twitter’s sweep of bot accounts and trolls all started with the 2016 US Presidential election. It has been speculated that a Russian troll factory used some of America’s most widely used technology platforms to ‘deceive’ voters on a large scale to exacerbate political and social tensions.
“One of the biggest shifts is in how we think about balancing free expression versus the potential for free expression to chill someone else’s speech,” Twitter’s VP, Del Harvey told the Washington Post. “Free expression doesn’t really mean much if people don’t feel safe.”
Fake accounts and bots have taken over the cryptocurrency space, and many of these accounts claim to be founders and co-founders of many blockchain projects that are offering free cryptocurrency. Twitter bots have taken over just about every sector of life in the Twitter-sphere.
The company expected numbers to drop and feels it’s a necessary evil to make its platform as healthy as possible.
At press time, TWTR shares are trading at $34.71, down -$8.23 (-19.17%).
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Featured Image: Twitter