Twitter’s Stocks dropped by more than eight percent early this week as investors reacted to growing concerns that swathes of its user base are being deleted.
Last Friday the Washington Post revealed that Twitter had suspended more than 70 million accounts in the months of May and June, with further mass suspensions expected to take place this month.
Twitter had roughly 336 million active users in this years first quarter, with the company suspending one million accounts a day.
The fear for investors is that this will affect the user metrics which are tied into the company’s performance and financial evaluations.
Ned Segal, Twitter’s chief financial officer took to the platform to reassure investors that the company’s user metrics would not be affected by the removal of 70 million users, saying that: “Most accounts we remove are not included in our reported metrics as they have not been active on the platform for 30 days or more, or we catch them at sign up and they are never counted.”
He then twitted a message assuring investors if the metric were affected they would know,
If we removed 70M accounts from our reported metrics, you would hear directly from us. This article reflects us getting better at improving the health of the service. Look forward to talking more on our earnings call July 27!
— Ned Segal (@nedsegal) July 9, 2018
Pressure
Twitter has been under increasing pressure to be more transparent and upfront about who its active users are, amid worries over fake accounts on the platform.
This follows Twitter admission to the United States Congress that it had identified around 50,000 accounts which were actually run by Russian bots, with the goal to influence the 2016 American election.
The company in the last few months has brought in a host of new policies to foster transparency on the site, with a particular focuses on advertising and political campaigning policy.
Within the last two weeks it has announced that users can now search through an advertisers handle and see what it has posted in the last seven days.
If an advertisement has been reported and then removed by Twitter it will be ‘tombstoned’ within 24 hours. This is means it will be displayed in Twitters new Ads Transparency Centre.
For those operating in the US political sphere Twitter outline in a blog post that users: “will be able to see further details, including billing information, ad spend, and impression data per Tweet.”
