Twitter usage at an all-time high: Elon Musk

“Twitter usage is at an all-time high lol,” he tweeted.

He further quipped that he hopes the servers don’t melt.

Twitter, in an internal FAQ shared with its sales team, claims that its monetisable daily user (mDAU) growth has shot over 20% since Musk took charge of the microblogging platform,
reported the Verge.

According to the report, the aim of the FAQ was to be used by the sales team during its conversations with advertisers.

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Twitter has added more than 15 million mDAUs, “crossing the quarter billion mark” since the end of the second quarter, when it stopped reporting financials as a public company, as per the FAQ.

These figures are a stark contrast to the expectations that followers would flee the platform after Musk took charge as hateful content continues to rise. However, the FAQ for advertisers claims that “levels of hate speech remain within historical norms, representing 0.25% to 0.45% of tweets per day among hundreds of millions”.

Soon after taking over the company,
Musk told advertisers, “Twitter aspires to be the most respected advertising platform in the world that strengthens your brand and grows your enterprise”. He later blamed pressure from “activist groups” for the pullback by advertisers.

Advertisers halt ads

Last week several US companies, including General Mills, United Airlines, and Audi of America said they were temporarily halting ads on Twitter despite Musk’s promise to advertisers.

The pullback comes amid growing concerns that misinformation and ‘objectionable’ content may be allowed to proliferate on the platform under Musk’s leadership, and that ads could appear alongside such content.

Some large Indian brands are following suit, fearing a rise in ‘objectionable’ content under Musk’s stewardship.

“We have paused paid advertising on Twitter as we seek clarity on the new direction and controls within the platform,” a spokesperson for Mondelez India, the country’s largest chocolate maker, said in an emailed reply to our queries. She said the company has done so “because it takes brand safety very seriously”.

Globally, ad sales contribute over three-fourths of the company’s revenues, but Indian companies spend a tiny sum on Twitter ads. The platform had over 23.6 million users in India as of January 2022, according to Statista.