Heavy Accounts Begin To Disappear, Twitter Loses Prestige Due To Lots Of Pornographic Content

JAKARTA - Twitter is currently struggling to keep its most active users, who are vital to their business, engaged on this social media. This underscores the challenges facing Tesla chief executive Elon Musk as he approaches a deadline to close a $44 billion deal to buy the social media company.

These "heavy tweeters" accounts for less than 10% of overall monthly users but generate 90% of all tweets and half of global revenue. Heavy tweeters have seen an "absolute decline" since the pandemic began, wrote a Twitter researcher in an internal document titled "Where have Tweeters gone?"

According to the document, a "heavy tweeter" is defined as someone who logs into Twitter six or seven days a week and tweets about three to four times a week.

The study also found shifts in interest over the past two years among the most active English-speaking users on Twitter that could make the platform less attractive to advertisers.

According to the report, Cryptocurrencies and “unsafe for work” (NSFW) content, which includes nudity and pornography, are topics of greatest interest to heavy English-speaking users,

At the same time, interest in news, sports and entertainment is waning among these users. Tweets on the topic, which have helped Twitter polish its image as the world's "digital city square," as Musk once called it, are also among the most sought after by advertisers.

Reported by Reuters, Twitter declined to detail how many of its tweets were in English or how much money English speakers made. But according to some demographic analysis is important for the Twitter business.

According to investors, the platform earned more ad revenue from the United States alone than all other markets in the world combined in the fourth quarter. “Most of the ads in the United States are likely to target English-speaking users, said Jasmine Enberg, an analyst at Intelligence Insider, as quoted by Reuters.

The Twitter study examined the number of English-heavy tweeters who showed interest in a topic, based on the accounts they follow, and how that number of users has changed over the past two years.

Twitter is motivated to investigate "disturbing" trends among users that may have been masked by the overall growth of daily active users and better understand the decline in the company's most active users, the document said. The study doesn't make any specific conclusions about why heavy users on the platform are declining.

"We regularly conduct research on various trends, which evolve based on what is happening in the world. Our overall audience continues to grow, reaching 238 million. mDAU in Q2 2022," said a Twitter spokesperson on Monday, which uses the acronym for active users. monetizable daily.

The number of heavy users interested in NSFW and cryptocurrency content is also growing, according to the study.

Twitter is one of the few major social media platforms to allow pornography on its service, and the company estimates that adult content makes up 13% of Twitter's total content, according to an internal slide presentation seen by Reuters. The presentation did not explain how the figure was calculated.

Reuters also reported in September that advertisers generally avoid controversy or nudity for fear of damaging their brands. Major advertisers including Dyson, PBS Kids and Forbes suspended ads due to accounts soliciting child pornography on Twitter.

In response to the September report, Twitter said it has "no tolerance for child sexual exploitation" and is investing more resources into its work against such material.

Twitter's most active English-speaking users are also increasingly interested in cryptocurrencies, hitting an all-time high in late 2021. But interest in the topic has declined since the crypto price crash in June, and the study notes that cryptocurrencies may not be an area of ​​growth in the future.

Current and former Twitter employees who spoke to Reuters said they feared Musk's demands to reduce content moderation and his reported plans to kill staff, which they said would exacerbate the decline in content quality on the platform.

The topics that traditionally made Twitter a popular platform for its millions of users are now declining among the most active English-speaking users.

Interest in world news, as well as liberal politics, spikes during major events such as the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. But the category has lost the largest number of Twitter users and is showing no signs of recovering.

Twitter also lost a "crushing" percentage of heavy users interested in fashion or celebrities like the Kardashians. These users are likely to switch to rival platforms such as Instagram from Meta Platform and TikTok ByteDance.

The study also expressed surprise at the decline in interest for e-sports and online streaming, which previously grew rapidly on Twitter. "Large communities are now in decline," the report said.

"There seems to be a significant difference between what I imagine are our company values ​​and our growth patterns," wrote one Twitter researcher.