The company acknowledges that it is losing a “devastating” number of active users, interested in fashion or famous.
Economy The US investigates Elon Musk for his tug-of-war in the purchase of Twitter.
The last occurrence of Elon Musk Launches a perfume and jokes about using its sales to buy Twitter.
Last April, a few days before launching an offer to buy Twitter, Elon Musk lamented the state of the social network. “Is Twitter dying?” he asked as he pointed out that many of the top ten accounts on the social network showed barely any signs of activity. “Taylor Swift He hasn’t written anything in three months and Justin Bieber He’s only posted one message all year,” Musk said.
I was right. Celebrities, artists, politicians… everyone is on Twitter, but few actually use the social network unless they are in campaign or they have just published an album or a book.
Twitter breaks down each fiscal quarter the number of “monetizable” active users that, according to the social network, has grown by 16.6% since last year and stands at about 237.8 million users. In principle, good numbers.
An internal investigation to which Reuters has had access, however, indicates that the reality is more complex than this growing figure suggests. Twitter’s most active users have long been posting fewer messages or left the social network.
Twitter defines an “intensive user” as anyone who consults the social network almost daily and writes at least three or four times a week. They are only 10% of users assets per month but generate 90% of messages that can be read on the social network and account for half of the service’s income.
Since the start of the pandemic, their number has dropped considerably. Also interest in most topics, such as news, sports or entertainment. Twitter acknowledges that it is losing a “devastating” number of active users interested in fashion or celebrities like the kardashiansas these users are likely migrating to Instagram or TikTok.
The internal report, entitled ‘Where are the tweeters?’, explains that the only content that has grown in recent years is that related to cryptocurrencies and the so-called NSFW (acronym in English for “Not Safe For Work”), which stands for images and videos of pornographic contentwith complete nudity or with violent content.
Post without restrictions
Twitter is one of the few social networks that allows you to post without restriction. sexually explicit videos and photos and although it does not highlight these messages, it is not difficult to find them when performing a search. Only part of them show a warning explaining that they may contain problematic images or that they may offend viewers’ sensibilities.
This increase in this type of content could be behind Twitter’s interest in launching a copper tool by contentwhich would allow accounts to offer messages only to those who pay for access as other platforms already do, such as Only Fans.
The report comes at a complex time. After months of trying to renegotiate the original purchase agreement, Elon Musk appears poised to close the acquisition this week for the original price of $44 billion. The Delaware courts have given him until Friday to close the agreement or else they will intervene in the process to determine if you must pay the amount originally agreed -and considered excessive by financial analysts- or if can get away from the problem.
It is not clear what strategy Musk will follow if he finally takes control of Twitter, although he has hinted that he will be more lax with content moderation and is open to the fact that many of the accounts that have been expelled from the social network, such as the former US president, donald trumpthey can republish messages on it.
Musk has also assured that he wants to turn Twitter into a “super application” in the style of WeChat in China, which brings together a whole series of services that go beyond social networks, including digital payments or electronic commerce.