Twitter Stock Plunges 21 Percent After Earnings Show Effects of Fake-Account Purge (marketwatch.com)

Twitter shares fell 21% on Friday as the company reported that user growth had turned negative, even as its quarterly results beat Wall Street expectations. The decline was even greater than Facebook's almost 19 percent plunge in shares after the social media giant reported disappointing results. MarketWatch reports: Twitter posted a profit for the third consecutive quarter, with its $134 million in net income equating to 13 cents a share. Adjusted per-share earnings came to 17 cents. The FactSet consensus estimate had been 16 cents. Twitter's revenue climbed 24% to $710.5 million to beat the FactSet consensus estimate by about $2 million. Even as executives talked about Twitter's bright future on the earnings calls, investors appeared to react to Twitter's slowing user growth, as its monthly user count went south, falling by 1 million to 355 million, as compared with the year's first quarter. The decline was expected after recent reports had the company purging about a million fake accounts a day.

Comments

I called this.

[Narcocide]

Anyone remember when I said they were at least 30% bots and when the world finds out the shareholders all take a bath?

Re:The election brought in a ton of money

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you saying the media was easy on Trump? You are delusional.

I wonder if the media are ready to call out these folks?;

Obama’s chief economist: Trump’s economic projections are “the most absurd I’ve ever seen” He predicts huge growth rates, of 3 percent a year, without explaining how he’d get there.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/19/17012288/trump-budget-proposal-obama-chief-economist-jason-furman-interview

Obama: Trump lacks ‘magic wand’ to grow economy. “He just says, ‘I’m gonna negotiate a better deal.’ Well how? How exactly are you going to negotiate that?”

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-live-president-obamas-town-hall-in-elkhart-indiana

Team Obama: Sorry, America, the ‘new normal’ may be here to stay

"The good times may be over for good. In a speech to the Economic Club of New York yesterday, US Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said the US GDP growth rate, adjusted for inflation, is now projected to run a little above 2% a year."

http://www.aei.org/publication/team-obama-sorry-america-the-new-normal-may-be-here-to-stay/

If Trump thinks he can get more than 3% economic growth, he's dreaming

http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-3percent-20170519-story.html

Then there are the nonpolitical observers, such as bond guru Bill Gross, who says: "High rates of growth, and the productivity that drives it, are likely distant memories from a bygone era." And academic economists such as Northwestern's Robert J. Gordon, who states bluntly in his pessimistic book "The Rise and Fall of American Growth" that U.S. GDP's best years are behind it.

http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-3percent-20170519-story.html

Re:The election brought in a ton of money

[Highdude702]

Where do you get your weed man? I need some of that.

Just to be clear

[Okian Warrior]

I honestly think one of the main reasons Trump won was the media's refusal to call him out on obvious lies and his shady business record. And that refusal was fueled by a desire to see a horse race and to suck up all those ad buys. Trump should never have been a serious candidate. He refused to release his tax returns, has a string of failed businesses and a court case where he admitted under oath his net worth isn't near what he claims and a long history of extra-marital affairs of the sort that don't go down well with the base he was trying to appeal to. That baggage should have wrecked him. But the media continually went easy on him even as they piled on Hillary.
Of course if they'd buried Trump in his own bad press early on folks would have stopped paying attention and the guys bank rolling his campaign would stop; meaning no more free eyeballs and no more free ad money. Trump got something like a billion in free coverage most of it positive. But then again if the media was doing it's job we'd be calling Bernie Mr President.

Okay, just so I'm clear here.

You think the media *wasn't* incessantly harsh on Trump in the run-up to the election.

You think most of the media coverage was positive.

I am at a loss as to how, exactly, the media could have been more harsh...

It's about time

[timholman]

Using Twitter is like playing Russian Roulette. Every time you tweet, you pull the trigger. Most of the time, nothing happens, but sooner or later you'll get unlucky and the Internet mob will destroy you for what you tweeted (latest case in point: James Gunn).

Maybe, just maybe, people are finally beginning to realize just how toxic Twitter really is. It only took a few thousand ruined lives and careers to get the point across.

Fantasy cage match: Network Effects v Market Cap

[shanen]

What's interesting me about this news, also extended to Facebook, is the interplay between the corporate value that's actually based on network effects versus the delusional stock prices that drive the market cap. To review, the idea of network effects is that more users of the network increase the value of the network, often more than linearly. However, what happens when lots of the users become fake identities that are not actually contributing any real value? The tiny bit of the stock price that is related to actual value (rather than gambling machines battling to the death) is going to have to adjust when the network appears to shrink.

From a fundamental level (as if anyone cared anymore relative to technical speculation), I don't see any value in Twitter from the git go.

Good keep going

[ArchieBunker]

It does nothing positive for society.

Re:The election brought in a ton of money

[CaptainDork]

Not disagreeing with you at all.

Trump would have won.

People wanted change.

Hillary self-identified as Obama 2.0.

The Democratic party rigged their whole primary process. Bernie was not supposed to be there to dilute the vote.

Clinton had too much baggage and Sanders was too radical to the left.

Trump promised whatever it was that his immediate rally-goers needed to survive.

Back to your point:

Businesses don't care about anything except money.

America is not a Republic or a democracy.

It's a Capitalistic society.

Re:The election brought in a ton of money

[misexistentialist]

the more media coverage Hillary or Bernie get the worse they look because they have no charisma; the Democrat Party thought the only reason a nobody like Obama could push Hillary out of the way was because of race, but Hillary was actually inferior to a black man

Just so we're clear

[raymorris]

> Using Twitter is like playing Russian Roulette. Every time you tweet, you pull the trigger.
> case in point: James Gunn

So what you're saying is every time you talk, things like this might spill out of your mouth?:

"I like when little boys touch me in my silly place."
-- James Gunn

"The best thing about being raped is when youâ(TM)re done being raped and itâ(TM)s like 'whew this feels great, not being raped!'"
-- James Gunn

"walked over a table to one of the kid actors on set, looked at the kid, and started masturbating right at him. ... A string of semen shot out of the mini-monkey-wood and splash-landed DIRECTLY ON THE KID.
Screaming and freaking out commenced.
I know it might be sick, but that story makes me extremely happy."
-- James Gunn

"Watching Trapped in the Closet, R Kellyâ(TM)s second best video after the one where he urinates on a child.â
-- James Gunn

If these are the kinds of things you might randomly say, your Russian roulette, please - get help.

Re:Just so we're clear

[thegarbz]

If these are the kinds of things you might randomly say, your Russian roulette, please - get help.

This is the kind of thing someone would say not at all understanding the entertainment industry or the human brain. But let's point out two things in isolation:

a) James Gunn was a filmmaker whose art 10+ years ago relied heavily on shock humour. To get recognised you need to make your mark in people's minds. Blow their minds, shock their minds, make them think you're incredibly stupid, whatever. You need to do something that gets you noticed and usually that something will be in line with your general artistic direction too. Typically these people use a persona to further their art and their twitter may be a reflection of their directing style but not necessarily their beliefs.

b) 10 years ago. People develop, people change. Maybe he did get help? Maybe you're punishing a reformed person for something they no longer are. 10 years is a long time and I personally wouldn't say a lot of the shit I said 10 years ago, not through some reformation but rather because we as persons continuously develop based on the experiences we encounter in this thing called life. You should compare the brutality of his films from the era of his tweet to what he is producing now to see how even the artistic persona develops over time with a person.

Bonus round: c) I drank a beer and LOLed. Maybe you just need a new sense of humour.

Re:Just so we're clear

[timholman]

So what you're saying is every time you talk, things like this might spill out of your mouth?

No, that's you projecting that because I pointed out that James Gunn destroyed his life and career by using Twitter, that somehow I am okay with pedophilia and rape. That says a great deal more about you than it does about me, or James Gunn.

What Gunn tweeted years ago was tasteless, provocative shock humor (to him, at least). But because he used Twitter to do it, and he put it out for the world to see, and because Twitter later evolved into a place where "thought crime" must be punished, no matter what, now his career as a filmmaker is over.

Gunn has never been charged with any crimes related to his sick tweets, he has repeatedly apologized for them, and he is by all reports a very decent person who made the mistake of saying some vile things many years ago in an ill-considered attempt at very sick humor. It doesn't matter. His career is over, and apparently you are just fine with that.

If you are happy in a world where the Internet mob can destroy a person just for saying something offensive, even when it happened years ago and the person is sincerely apologetic, then you had better fervently hope that one day someone with an axe to grind doesn't make it his or her mission to go through your own online history, or the history of your children, and look for ways to "punish" you or them as well.

They mostly just let him talk

[rsilvergun]

and didn't do very much criticism. They reported on his refusal to release his taxes but never once got into _why_ it mattered. I didn't actually know but picked up the corruption angle from the left wing press. I never once saw an interview with the many, many businesses he screwed over and/or never paid. The same goes for the stories about how he would have made more money sticking his daddy's fortune in an index fund than on his failed business ventures. And the affairs. He's got decades of them. Where was the research into that? We didn't find out crap until _after_ the election. He did a cameo in a soft core porn movie for Pete's sake.

Oh, meanwhile Felix Ungur of the Young Turks broke the news of MSNBC burying Bernie Sanders in favor of the corporatists Hilary Clinton and that news barely registered.

Re:With the exception of the LA Times

[ravenshrike]

During the primaries all the left wing msm went easy on him and treated him with kid gloves. The moment he won the primaries the MSM barring Fox news completely flipped the script.

Re:With the exception of the LA Times

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't speak about local stations, but CNN, MSNBC and Fox News (apart from Chris Tucker and Sean Hannity) have been absolutely hell bent on painting the most negative picture possible of Trump and his supporters. For two years straight. As have basically every late night comedy/talk show, SNL, and most big online news sites.

Stop smoking crack.

And this is the result of so-called "investment"

[Puls4r]

The average person the street is not smart enough to understand that "investors" have not a damn thing to do with real performance. They'll see this and think that somehow twitter is not a profitable or sustaining company, despite the fact that their profits are good.

What we have is irresponsible profit-driven reporters who want short clips rather than explaining what this actually means.

And in the mean time, we have a bunch of idiots who are so absorbed with another idiots that all they want to do is talk politics and trash talk eachother.

This easily could have been titled "Childish investors with no foresight have knee-jerk reaction to something that was already predicted." Or perhaps "Company does the right thing, angers investors."

Stock price no longer has any real tie in with the success or failure of companies. It's just a ticker number that people who participate in real-life gambling pay attention to.

I'm not sure why this comes as a surprise ?

[nehumanuscrede]

Twitter had an exaggerated user base which inflated stock because more users = great company.

Twitter wipes out a significant amount of fake accounts and the stock plummets.
( Company not quite as amazing as they pretended it was )

Pretty sure that's how this is supposed to work ?

Twitter can be safe

[SuperKendall]

I have a Twitter account where I just post technical info, zero politics. I don't follow political people and even some technical people I follow I have to mute from time to time.

It is possible to run a Twitter account that is pure utility and friendly vibes, where there's really nothing that anyone can gain much traction on.

Mobs on Twitter are inherently a stupid thing anyway. You can just take a break from Twitter and most of the people will be gone, blocking the handful of losers that remain. Then just ignore what they say after that.

Now it is true it is VERY easy to let Twitter work you up to the point where you are not posting thoughtfully. So I agree you should be careful with Twitter, but that doesn't mean everyone should drop it just because it can be bad for you...

Re:Twitter can be safe

[Mashiki]

One of the companies I worked for a few years ago did something similar to this. Guess what happened? That mob you're talking about, they went out of their way to get the guy who operated it fired because he refused to play the political game and simply muted them.

Seriously, Twitter is the equivalent of pig sty loaded with ebola and leprosy. If someone is so determined to ruin your life, the little self-offend-o-trons will go out of their way to try and ruin it. It's simply easier on twitter because companies are still stuck in the "it's great for marketing, look at all these people!" mindset, making small mobs of assholes seem large. Harder to do in meatspace, but it still happens see Matt Taylor for example.

Re:With the exception of the LA Times

[fafalone]

[Picture of a turd]

Fox News: "Now this is an amazing thing people, with its beautiful deep browns and rich filling aroma. And they've done such an amazing job with the lighting. We're witnessing something amazing here."

CNN: "Folks, this is a pile of fecal matter. It looks and smells terrible, and isn't really a great thing."

The Right: "Fake News!! Look at how biased CNN is, typical leftist media lies trying to make it look bad!!"

There's a simple reason mainstream media outside of Fox almost always portrays Trump negatively: Because what he is saying and doing are actually terrible things. It isn't bias to call a turd a turd just because the other side is hell bent on trying to distort reality by insisting it's something wonderful.
The right has an obsessive, pervasive campaign to try to turn outlets that lean a little to the left, and like everyone from time to time make an error, into incessantly lying intentional extreme-left propaganda outlets, and it's working beyond what they could have hoped for. Not only have they hoodwinked the entire right wing, even some left leaning moderates are buying into it. Meanwhile, Fox News is almost as bad as North Korea's state TV with distortion and leader-worship. On a bias scale of 1-10, CNN is a 2, MSNBC a 3, and Fox News a 9.