Twitter Inc’s (NYSE:TWTR) move to crack down on online abuse is one of the best pieces of news for TWTR stock in a long time.
Twitter stock remains doomed for the long term as long as user growth remains stagnant. If TWTR is going to compete again the duopoly of Facebook Inc (NYSE:FB) and Alphabet Inc’s Google (NASDAQ:GOOG, NASDAQ:GOOGL) it needs to scale up dramatically.
As long as growth was rising, the market loved Twitter stock. Now that it appears to have topped out — with monetization challenges to boot — shares are fairly unloved.
There are surely a number of reasons why Twitter has so far failed to catch on as a truly mass market social network.
However, it’s a good bet that one of TWTR’s largest liabilities is that it’s become a primary conduit for hate and harassment. It gives the service a black eye and must turn off would-be users.
After all, who wants to join something that trafficked in racist attacks against a Ghostbusters star?
A New Era for TWTR Stock
When Twitter kicked gleefully horrible person Milo Yiannopoulos off the site, it showed that it’s finally getting serious about cleaning up the problem. The Breitbart tech editor has long been a blight on the network, and Twitter’s move feels like a real point of change.
TWTR is actually committing resources to improve policing on the service. The company is making it far easy to verify a Twitter account. You can be sure that the number of blue check marks Twitter hands out will explode. Staffers dedicated to running the program are going to be swamped, but TWTR is taking the hit.
Twitter’s pitch to the market is its content strategy. The company thinks it can draw in new users by inking deals with the NFL and NBA, among others.
Whether new users flock to the network for such content is very much an open question, but a more civil Twitter should certainly help.
As of this writing, Dan Burrows did not hold a position in any of the aforementioned securities.
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