Twitter says election crackdown was ‘worth it’ as it sees little impact from banning Donald Trump

President Trump holds up printed tweets by Google during a press conference in March 2020

Credit: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty

Twitter’s US election crackdowns and its banning of president Donald Trump did not significantly slow down its growth and were worth the trouble, the company has said.

The social network told investors on Tuesday that its monthly active users would continue to increase by around 20pc in the first three months of 2021, despite a small hit from its attempts to curb misinformation and violence.

That would be significant drop from Twitter’s growth at the end of 2020, during which its monthly users grew by 27pc to 192m. But the company attributed that drop to the massive one-time brought by the pandemic, which it will now struggle to match.

It comes after figures from Apptopia, a mobile analytics company, showed no change in Twitter’s daily usage after Mr Trump’s ban, despite some of his supporters vowing to boycott the service.

Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief executive, said: “I am really proud of how we navigated 2020… we are a platform that is obviously much larger than any one topic or any one account. We are also not dependent upon just news and politics being on Twitter.”

In its letter to shareholders, Twitter said that its election changes “had a small but measurable negative impact” on its monthly users, but said they were “as expected, and well worth the effort to protect the integrity of the conversation around the election period in the US”.

Twitter stock dropped after POTUS ban

Shares rose by as much as 4.4pc in after-hours trading.

The statement was part of Twitter’s earnings report for the last three months of 2020, which showed its revenues rising by 28pc to $1.3bn (£940m) from the same period in 2019, and booking profits of $222m, up 87pc. Its figures for the full year of 2020 were less rosy, showing a loss of $1.1bn on revenues of $3.7bn.

The company predicted a “modest” drag on its advertising revenues from Apple’s new iPhone privacy measures, which will block advertisers from tracking millions of users’ digital footprints when they take effect this spring.

It appeared to have increased its reliance on advertising revenue, with "other" income decreasing from 12pc to 10pc of the total. The segment includes Twitter’s data licencing business, which charges companies to search and analyse its enormous archive of publicly visible tweets, retweets and follows.

The company has been attempting to widen its income sources, buying the Dutch newsletter company Revue last month and taking a 5pc cut of writers’ subscription fees.

Ned Segal, Twitter’s finance chief, told the Wall Street Journal that its decision to ban Mr Trump was welcomed by advertisers, saying that they valued transparency and consistency in how the company enforces its rules.

According to Zignal Labs, a social media tracking firm in San Francisco, misinformation about election fraud dropped from 2.5m mentions to 688,000 mentions across Twitter and several other social networks in the wake of Mr Trump’s ejection on Jan 8.

Nazmul Islam, an analyst at eMarketer, said: “Twitter caps off a turbulent 2020 with a strong performance in Q4. Their platform improvements continued to pay off by enhancing user experience…

“Q1 2021 might see some user growth fall off due to the Twitter’s removal of accounts and defections from those who oppose the account bans. However, advertising spend should remain strong from both brand and direct response with twitter’s continued investment in their infrastructure.”