Twitter Optimistic Of Better User Growth, Despite Elon Musk Questioning Number Of Fake Accounts And Spam

JAKARTA - Twitter Inc., is gearing up for its most ambitious quarter ever in user growth. This is what the leaders of the social media company's consumer products division told their staff on Tuesday, June 7.

In their internal meeting, Twitter set a target to grow its monetizable daily active users, or users who view ads, by 13 million this quarter.

"This is the highest target the team has ever set," the leaders told staff.

They added that Twitter is on track to achieve its goals and currently has 8.5 million in user growth, one of the best growth quarters to date. Twitter shares were up 1% in afternoon trading.

The San Francisco-based company maintains its ambition to attract new users even as its deal to be acquired by billionaire Elon Musk remains uncertain.

Musk in a Monday filing warned Twitter that he might walk away from the $44 billion deal if the company did not provide data that would allow him to independently verify the proportion of spam and fake accounts on the social media platform.

The company has said in public filings that spam and fake accounts represent less than 5% of daily active users that can be monetized on a quarterly basis.

The war in Ukraine also boosted user activity on Twitter at the end of the first quarter, but time spent on the platform itself has decreased by 4% this quarter.

Twitter added 20 million users during the second quarter of 2020. This is the highest quarterly growth since 2019, as users flocked to the platform to search for news at the start of the pandemic.

Since then, the company has struggled to stay on track to achieve its long-term targets of achieving user and revenue growth, as well as implementing employee hiring freezes and cost-saving measures.

Twitter's internal target of 13 million in user growth exceeded Wall Street's expectations. According to IBES and Refinitiv data, they only project an average twitter growth of 9 million users.