Twitter user base grows amid misinformation crackdown

Twitter attracted more users in the fourth quarter, even though it intensified a crackdown on election misinformation that eventually led to the permanent ban of former President Donald Trump .

"We are a platform that's obviously much larger than any one topic or any one account," Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said in a call with analysts on Tuesday. Roughly 80% of Twitter's audience is outside the US, he added.

The social media site said monetizable daily active users rose to 192 million in the quarter that ended Dec. 31, up 27% from 152 million in the same period a year earlier. The metric refers to people who log in to the site at least once a day and are shown ads. The user numbers were slightly lower than the 196.5 million daily active users analysts expected. 

Twitter attributed the growth in users to product improvements that made it easier for people to follow their interests and topics on the site. The company also benefited from news events around COVID-19 and the US elections.

The rise in users pushed revenue at Twitter, which makes most of its money from ad sales, 28% higher to $1.29 billion, beating analysts' estimates of $1.2 billion. The company earned 27 cents per share, beating the 16 cents per share anticipated. Excluding certain expenses, Twitter earned 38 cents per share, beating expectations of 31 cents per share.

The results came as Twitter ramped up efforts to combat the spread of misinformation, including baseless claims of voter fraud pushed by Trump. The company's actions infuriated conservative users, some of whom turned to other sites, such as Parler and Gab, which have fewer rules about what content can be posted. 

The fourth quarter ended before Twitter took the unprecedented step of permanently banning Trump from the platform in early January after the deadly riot at the US Capitol. Twitter said that Trump's tweets violated its rules against glorifying violence.

Dorsey said the company is looking at giving users a way to moderate content themselves or in groups. Twitter started testing a new community forum called Birdwatch that allows users to identify misleading tweets and add notes that provide context.

The company is reportedly looking at new ways to generate revenue, including the possibility of charging a subscription fee for some services, such as its TweetDeck dashboard for scheduling tweets and managing multiple accounts. Bloomberg reported Monday that Twitter is also looking at possibly charging for exclusive content or ad-free feeds.

Twitter has also been testing a feature called fleets that lets users post photos, text and video that disappear within 24 hours. It's also experimenting with audio chat rooms called Spaces, which are similar in concept to rooms in Clubhouse, a chat app. 

Dorsey said early results for fleets "look good" and Spaces is a "really compelling area," but he didn't share any user numbers for those features.

"It will present a new model for how we think about instantaneous and potentially ephemeral communities in public conversation," he said, referring to Spaces.