By: Juan Rivera
Getting rid of bots has caused Twitter’s stock price to rise, the company said.
An increase of nearly 10 percent comes as new advertisers and users come together.
The San Francisco-based company saw quarterly revenue reach $841 million; projections had called for only $829 million.
Purging itself of hate speech and misinformation, especially in regards to politics, has gotten a thumbs up from investors.
Only three months ago, President Donald Trump told Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who was visiting the White House, that there were issues he needed to address. He was referring to what many see as censorship of conservative news and opinion.
Dorsey told analysts and investors last week, “We do see, obviously, a lot of conversation around news and politics, around the Democratic debates, and we believe that Twitter has an important role to carry these conversations and to help learn about what’s unfolding within other countries… Our No. 1 priority within elections and conversations on the elections is making sure we’re protecting the integrity of the conversation.” To accomplish that, he added, will require “identifying forms of manipulation used to amplify misleading information.”
Revenue was up 18% year over year, the company said, due to domestic growth. “Twitter said it reached an average of 139 million monetizable daily active users (mDAUs) in the second quarter, a 14% increase year over year. Average domestic mDAUs came to 29 million in the quarter, a 10% increase compared with a year earlier. Internationally, average mDAUs were 110 million in the quarter, up 15% from the previous year,” reported CNBC. “On a call with analysts, CFO Ned Segal said Twitter has been “remarkably consistent” with bringing in users at the top of the funnel who visit the site for a specific purpose. It’s focused on converting those people into mDAUs by helping them “find what they’re looking for faster,” he said.”
The New York Post reported that Twitter has “been trying to improve what the company calls the “health” of conversations on its platform amid widespread criticism that it doesn’t do enough to remove hate speech, abuse and harassment. In a call with analysts, Dorsey — who famously adheres to a strict diet that allows him only one meal per day and requires that he fast all weekend — said “health” remains the top priority. “Health is a long-term growth factor for us, and we have been doubling our efforts to make sure that we can address all the issues that we’re seeing on the service,” he said. “A big focus for us over the past year has been to proactively identify content on Twitter that would violate our rules, so that we don’t require a report.”
