This week, social media is having a moment of reckoning.
It began Wednesday with Facebook, which announced that daily active user counts had fallen in Europe, to 279 million from 282 million earlier this year. Facebook also indicated it was no longer growing in the US and Canada, two of the most lucrative advertising markets. Just as Facebook was working through its second year of nearly nonstop scandals over unchecked political meddling and data misuse, it was becoming clear that the days of consistent and relatively easy growth were fading.
Then, on Friday, Twitter said it too was seeing user counts drop, to 335 million people who log in each month from 336 million just three months earlier, in part because of its efforts to, as it says, improve "the long-term health of the platform."
Amid the hairy questions about the health of social media sites and their impact on our lives, our politics and our culture, it seems Wall Street finally has to worry as well.
"We're investing so much insecurity that it will significantly impact our profitability," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on a Wednesday conference call. "This is a critical year for Facebook."
And maybe beyond this year as well, given the demands on these platforms to police themselves.
"We don't think that this work will necessarily ever be done," Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said Friday. "It doesn't have an endpoint."
Wall Street has clearly been rattled. Facebook on Thursday suffered the worst market value drop ever for a public company in the US, slumping by $120 billion. On Friday Twitter watched its value sink more than 17 percent after releasing its earnings results.
cnet
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