While it was reported earlier this month that Twitter had suspended over 70 million accounts, and earlier this week it purged millions of suspended and inactive accounts, a new report has surfaced that during the last three months of 2017 the social media platform suspended 58 million accounts. According to the AP, these accounts were mostly from Twitter’s “Firehose” stream which is a premium feed that breaks news in real time for its users (making it a great way to stay on top of breaking news, directly on Twitter).
These suspended accounts were mostly bots and fake accounts. Likely in a response to the fake news that surfaced during (and after) the 2016 US Presidential Election. Twitter has been working hard since the election to clean up its platform and also make it easier for fake news to stand out so that users know it is indeed fake news. Twitter has also noted that the users that were suspended were bots mostly, and not anyone that expressed views different from their own. Twitter is looking to make it easier for users to talk to each other and filter out all of the noise that is currently on its platform.
With Twitter suspending hundreds of millions of accounts in the last six to nine months, many are worried what that might mean for its quarterly earnings – which are due to be reported later this month. Analysts are pegging advertising revenue to drop about one to two percent for the second quarter. While Twitter has said that monthly active user numbers should not be affected, seeing as these were bots and not all that active – not to mention the purge of frozen accounts didn’t count towards the monthly active user number anyways. But there may be a few surprises in the second quarter results for Twitter when those get released later this week.