Twitter Bottoms S&P 500 As Traders Fear Users Activity May Slow

Twitter plummeted on investor concern that the company’s escalating fight against fake accounts will slow user growth, according to Bloomberg.

The Washington Post said Friday that the company’s rate of account suspensions has more than doubled since October 2017, and that Twitter has suspended more than 70 million accounts in May and June. The stock fell as much 9.8 percent Monday, the biggest intraday decline in more than three months, before paring the loss later in the day.

The Post’s report echoes Twitter’s own disclosures from two weeks ago, when the company said its machine learning algorithms had identified more than 9.9 million potentially spam or automated accounts a week as of May, an increase from 3.2 million a week last September and more than triple the number from a year earlier. The company said it’s conducting an audit to ensure that every account created on Twitter has passed a security check to prevent bots from gaining access to the social media platform. The change has already stopped more than 50,000 spam sign-ups a day, according to Twitter.

A Twitter spokesman said the Post’s numbers confirm what the company had released on June 26 and “we have not and do not include spam accounts that we have identified in the active user numbers that we report to shareholders.“ The company, in its first-quarter earnings report, also highlighted that the number of reported monthly active users would be “negatively impacted“ by the continuing effort to rid the service of fake accounts.