Twitter

Twitter looks like the latest social media company that will enjoy a stock boost, after it reported record quarterly user growth and topped analyst sales projections when it reported its 1Q financials on Thursday morning. The company, led by CEO Jack Dorsey, added 14 million monetizable daily active users during 1Q. Its sales of $807.6 million surpassed analyst estimates of $776 million.

Tweets about television are up in nearly every category from March 1 through April 15 compared with the same time last year, largely driven by the coronavirus pandemic, Nielsen found in a study, but one category stands out as a glaring exception: sports.

Fox News is making a return to Twitter, more than a year after going silent on the social-media platform. Now the news outlet is poised to resurface on the venue, with executives envisioning the chance to use it as a service or a means of getting information about the coronavirus outbreak to followers. Approximately 18.5 million people follow the network on Twitter.

Twitter said today that Silver Lake will make a $1 billion investment in the company. That money, along with cash on hand, is expected to be put toward a $2 billion stock buyback. Jack Dorsey remains the social media company’s CEO.

Secret labs. Magic cures. Government plots. Despite efforts by social media companies to stop it, false information about the coronavirus is proliferating around the world.

Twitter early Thursday posted $1.01 billion in fourth-quarter revenue, beating Wall Street estimates in a crucial quarter that’s being heavily scrutinized after some glitches in its advertising products resulted in disappointing  sales growth in the quarter before.

The company earned a wave of praise from Democrats over its move, announced Wednesday, but faced harsh criticism from many on the right, who questioned if it amounted to censorship.

The social media service’s CEO Jack Dorsey says: “While internet advertising is incredibly powerful and very effective for commercial advertisers, that power brings significant risks to politics, where it can be used to influence votes to affect the lives of millions.”

Twitter Inc. posted worse-than-expected third quarter revenue and profit on Thursday, which the company attributed to advertising problems including product bugs and unusually low demand over the summer, sending its shares down about 15%.

After a year of debate and criticism, an effort to add to a policy on banned speech led to a narrower restriction that applies only when religious groups are targeted.

Ned Segal, Twitter CFO, told investors at a Morgan Stanley Technology Conference that the company has become “much more clear with advertisers [as to] why they should use Twitter,” he said, adding that the company is missing some ad offerings that it is working to change.

do we have to choose sides in this debate — whether Twitter is inherently bad or inherently good? Not really. It’s entirely likely that Twitter, like so many other things the internet has brought us, is simultaneously hugely positive in many ways and hugely negative in other ways.

CNN’s Brian Stelter: “I used to think the transparency of Twitter helped improve trust in media. I think that’s true around the edges. But I’m leaning toward the Silicon Valley exec’s view that the incessant tweeting undermines trust. ‘You guys are down in the mud with the bots and the bad faith actors,’ the tech exec said.”

The National Association of Broadcasters’ “We Are Broadcasters” initiative will host a Twitter Chat Jan. 15 at 1 p.m. ET on the role of Spanish-language broadcasting. Online to chat about the “explosion” of Spanish-language broadcast content will be Fernando Pizzaro, Washington correspondent for Univision, and former Univision journalist Maria Elena Salinas.

Alphabet, Facebook, Netflix and others will be in focus on Sept. 24 when they are moved out of the tech and consumer discretionary sectors into a deepened pool of communication and media stocks. In the largest-ever shakeup of the Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS), the telecommunication services sector will be renamed “communication services” and include 18 companies pulled from consumer discretionary and technology, including Netflix, Walt Disney Co. and Twitter.

The company said Jones won’t be able to create new accounts on Twitter or take over any existing ones. In a tweet, it said it would continue to monitor reports about other accounts potentially associated with Jones or Infowars, and will “take action” if it finds any attempts to circumvent the ban.

With new attacks by President Trump, high-stakes testimony next week on Capitol Hill, and a midterm election vulnerable to online manipulation, tech’s giants are bracing themselves for two months after Labor Day that could decide whether and how much the government regulates them.

While the platforms may not have anticipated the influx of hate speech and meddling from foreign powers like Russia, North Korea and China, they should have acted more quickly once they found it.