Twitter Losing Its Most Active Users, Internal Documents Show

"Is Twitter dying?" billionaire Elon Musk mused in April, five days before offering to buy the social media platform.

Photo Insert: A "heavy tweeter" is defined as someone who logs in to Twitter six or seven days a week and tweets about three to four times a week.

The reality, according to internal Twitter research seen by Reuters, goes far beyond the handful of examples of celebrities ghosting their own accounts.

Twitter is struggling to keep its most active users - who are vital to the business - engaged, underscoring a challenge faced by the Tesla chief executive as he approaches a deadline to close his $44 billion deal to buy the company.

These "heavy tweeters" account for less than 10% of monthly overall users but generate 90% of all tweets and half of global revenue. Heavy tweeters have been in "absolute decline" since the pandemic began, a Twitter researcher wrote in an internal document titled “Where did the Tweeters Go?”

A "heavy tweeter" is defined as someone who logs in to Twitter six or seven days a week and tweets about three to four times a week, the document said.

The research also found a shift in interests over the past two years among Twitter's most active English-speaking users that could make the platform less attractive to advertisers, Sheila Dang, Matthew Lewis, and Kenneth Li reported for Reuters.

Cryptocurrency and "not safe for work" (NSFW) content, which includes nudity and pornography, are the highest-growing topics of interest among English-speaking heavy users, the report found.

At the same time, interest in news, sports, and entertainment is waning among those users. Tweets on those topics, which have helped Twitter burnish an image as the world’s "digital town square," as Musk once called it, are also the most desirable for advertisers.

The number of heavy users interested in NSFW and cryptocurrency content grew, the research found. Twitter is one of the few major social media platforms that permits nudity on its service, and the company has estimated that adult content constitutes 13% of Twitter, according to a separate internal slide presentation seen by Reuters.

The presentation did not elaborate on how the figure was calculated. Advertisers generally steer clear of controversy or nudity for fear of damaging their brands.

Major advertisers including Dyson, PBS Kids, and Forbes suspended advertising due to accounts that were soliciting child pornography on Twitter, Reuters reported in September.

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