It’s no secret that Twitter (ticker: TWTR) is a fledgling company and a breeding ground for everything from light fun to snark to even harassment. But could a once brightly lit bulb of the social media revolution crash and burn more than a decade after it took flight?
That was the prevailing rumor Thursday, as an evidently meta hashtag #SaveTwitter circulated on the platform, reports Reuters. By afternoon, it even had 100,000 tweets including the hashtag. Reuters reports some tweets suggested it originally came from a Twitter user frustrated with cyberbullying and Twitter’s process for dealing with it, though that’s not clear. For what it’s worth, TWTR stock had ticked up 3.6 percent mid-afternoon.
Twitter, for its part, is denying that the service will shut down. “There is absolutely no truth to the claims whatsoever,” a company spokesman tells Reuters.
Once one of Wall Street’s hottest stocks, shares of the social media dynamo have been dropping for more than two years, with TWTR stock plunging from $69 per share in early 2014 to about $26 per share in October 2015, when Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder and first CEO, retook the company’s reigns.
But Dorsey hasn’t been the golden boy that Twitter investors hoped for. In the few weeks after the former CEO’s return, shares jumped about 20 percent, climbing back above $30. But that would prove to be a one-time rally, and shares have lost more than a third of their value since then as the problems Dorsey set out to solve — sluggish user growth and an unengaging product — remain.
Today, you can add rapidly decelerating revenue growth and a deluge of user harassment controversies to the long list of Twitter’s issues. Nearly a year after Dorsey’s installment, TWTR is still losing money, while rivals Facebook (FB) (and its smart acquisition, Instagram) and Snapchat are gaining steam.
As for its abuse problem — most recently brought into the public conversation by “Ghostbusters” and “Saturday Night Live” actress Leslie Jones — that’s a whole other story. Literally, BuzzFeed devoted a whole long-form story on the subject. As Recode points out, Twitter’s former CEO Dick Costolo had some choice words on the piece, and the company issued a blog post itself.
1/ Total nonsense and laughably false as anybody who would speak on the record would tell you. Absurd.
Not even going to link to it.
— dick costolo (@dickc)
2/ shows a lack of understanding of the very basics of how trust and safety works at Twitter. Sensationalist nonsense.
— dick costolo (@dickc)
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Is It Too Late to #SaveTwitter (TWTR)? originally appeared on usnews.com
