Twitter Shares Nosedive After Drop In Monthly Active Users

Several tech companies released their quarterly financials this week, and things were not positive for some of the big names in social media. Just as Facebook suffered one of its worst market days ever on Thursday, Twitter shares took a plunge on Friday after the site reported a drop-off in monthly active users.

Twitter had 336 million monthly active users in the first quarter, which dropped to 335 million in the second, per Bloomberg. Twitter projected another drop-off in the third quarter, thanks to increased company efforts to rid the site of malefactors. Heightened privacy regulations in Europe could also play a role, as Facebook lost a few million users in Europe last quarter, too.

Twitter did report a 24 percent increase in revenue to $710 million, as well as an 11 percent increase in daily active users. However, TWTR shares were down more than 17 percent at the time of writing. Investors were likely unhappy with the site’s slight decrease in users, even if the explanation for it might be a net positive for the company.

Earlier this month, Twitter shares fell after reports that the social network was purging more than a million accounts per day. These accounts were removed from the site because they were either fake or malicious in some form. Twitter, for its part, insisted that the removed accounts would not be reflected in the site’s active user metrics, but the site still lost some monthly users anyway.

Not long after that, users started losing followers because Twitter decided to stop counting locked accounts in follower counts. That specifically referred to accounts locked by the site’s moderators for specific activity; accounts deliberately kept private by their owners still counted among follower metrics.

Twitter had a negative PR week overall. Reports that some right-wing figures, from Republican party officials to far-right conspiracy theorists, were being hidden in the site’s search function raised the ire of President Donald Trump. Shortly after Trump dubiously called the practice discriminatory and illegal in a tweet, Twitter appeared to set things back to normal.