Twitter unscrews on the stock market – La Croix

Around noon (16 hours GMT) Friday, the action of the blue bird dropped 19.13% to 34.72 dollars in a market slightly down (- 0.11%). This reaction is reminiscent of the one that followed the results of Facebook Thursday, the action of the first social network in the world also losing 19% in one sitting.

Twitter may well have published on Friday a historic profit of 100 million dollars (85 million), the third quarter in a row in the green after more than ten years of losses, the looks focused on the attendance of the platform.

The number of monthly active users, parameter released each quarter by the social network, fell by one million, to 335 million, while the market expected it to rise slightly.

In the documents published Friday and during the conference call, the leaders of the group have linked this decline to multiple initiatives of rationalization and cleaning of the platform.

Twitter has done a great cleaning since the beginning of the year to try to get rid of the users. who would try to use this channel for propaganda purposes or to prosper through an economy of false accounts and false subscribers.

Tens of millions of accounts have been removed for this purpose, even if the chief financial officer Ned Segal said Friday they were inactive users, not included in the monthly user population.

Also read: Twitter has closed 70 million suspicious accounts

"Headwinds"

Twitter is also looking to streamline its platform for users, who sometimes have trouble sorting through the flow that flows on their threads.

The San Francisco group wants to position itself in a legitimate site to learn, in addition to its social dimension.

Income at the head of the company in mid-2015 after leaving the operational management in 2008, co-founder Jack Dorsey embarked on a strategic reorientation with profitability as a priority

The strategy was validated in early 2018, with the publication of Twitter's first earnings, nearly twelve years after its creation. With the measures taken since his return and more since the beginning of the year, Jack Dorsey is committed to making Twitter a respectable company, popular with advertisers, and get rid of the image of big junk, sometimes land of expression of propaganda and hatred, which was regularly attached to it.

"We want people to feel free to express themselves, in safety" badured Jack Dorsey on Friday. But patience is not the first of the characteristics of the stock markets, which mainly held back on Friday the decline in the number of users.

They had already had the heavy hand with Facebook the day before, after the publication of forecasts deemed pessimistic and a growth in the number of users below expectations.

"The market was packed and prices adjusted to more moderate expectations" According to Daniel Ives, Head of Strategy in the cabinet GBH Insights.

For him, it is mainly the result of the new pressure put on social networks to provide greater security for their users, following the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the establishment of the European Data Protection Directive (RGPD). "It created headwinds" he says, which reduce the ability of these companies to grow.

This week also stressed, according to the badyst, the contrast between social networks and other American giants of new technologies, Amazon, Apple or Google, who benefit, on the contrary, "winds with cloud and e-commerce" .

However, " social networks are still there and there " says Jennifer Grygiel, professor at the University of Syracuse and subject specialist. "What Changed" she says, "it is that the public and the regulators no longer accept the discourse of com 'and the myth that they are too difficult to control.

La-Croix.com (with AFP)