Twitter loses 9 million users following crackdown on bot



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The monthly Twitter user count was another success last quarter, plunging 9 million users while the current crackdown was to rid the platform of bots, spam and other problematic accounts. The number of monthly users of the company rose from 335 million euros last quarter to 326 million euros this quarter, marking the second consecutive quarter of decline.

The decline was not unexpected. Last month, Twitter announced that it had begun to eliminate unsolicited accounts much more quickly. And the company warned that it could lose "one to one-digit numbers" in the coming months, due to the new technology that identifies bad actors and prevents them from going to the platform. . Clearly, Twitter ended up erasing more bad accounts than new real accounts. (Or he lost real ones too.)

Cleaning these accounts should lead to a better overall platform. But for the moment, the adjusted figures illustrate the weak growth of Twitter. Not only has it lost users this year, but its total number of users has returned to what it was in early 2017. For comparison, Facebook added 38 million. monthly users just the last quarter.

Twitter expects the user's refusal to continue as well. The company said it expects a further drop of "one – digit million" by next quarter, though not attributing it all to its crackdown by the bot. This is partly due to the fact that the company has abandoned SMS contracts to operators, and partly to "Twitter's decision to allocate resources to the GDPR".

However, if you are a Twitter user, you want Twitter's efforts in this space to succeed. Twitter believes it has "made significant progress in improving the health of the public conversation" on its site; and is very successful in that its new listings have actually dropped 20% from the previous quarter, as new audit requirements have been added.

"In the third quarter, we made progress in preventing the creation of new spammy or suspicious accounts by requiring new accounts to confirm either an email address or a phone number when they sign up on Twitter. by creating new accounts, "writes the company in its quarterly ranking.

Twitter attempts to put the user in context by pointing out that lost accounts are not good for the platform. This is certainly true, but Twitter has been counting on them so far and must take into account that, in the eyes of the public, growth is going in the wrong direction.

The health of the platform is one of the "priority areas of Twitter," said the company. "We will continue our efforts to remove spammy and suspicious accounts from the platform and prevent their creation in the service of a healthier public conversation."

There was a positive point about user growth: Daily active users continue to grow. Twitter still does not say exactly how many daily users, but it says that this number has increased by 9% over the previous year. Daily user growth has slowed, however – Twitter grew 14% this quarter last year.

And Twitter continued to generate profits, marking a full year of profitability. It's something the company has never done before, because it's also the first four quarters for which it has achieved a profit period.

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