Twitter’s stock dropped as much as 14% on Thursday after the company reported user growth that fell short of Wall Street expectations in its third quarter earnings.
The company’s daily active users grew 1 million from last quarter to 187 million users; analysts had expected the company to report 195 million daily active users.
On the bright side, Twitter posted revenue of $936 million for the quarter, far exceeding analysts expectations of $777 million, and up 14% compared to the same period last year. Twitter’s stock was up about 8% during regular trading hours.
Twitter’s quarterly report comes a day after CEO Jack Dorsey appeared before the Senate Commerce Committee, alongside Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO Sundar Pichai. The hearing was supposed to center on a crucial law, known as Section 230, that protects the companies’ ability to moderate content as they see fit. But Senators pressed the executives on other topics, including antitrust and voting misinformation. Dorsey was confronted by Republicans about why Twitter has fact-checked tweets by President Trump and about other claims of bias against conservative content.
Twitter reported Thursday that its ad revenue totaled $808 million, up 15%. The company announced a year ago that it would stop all political ads, saying that political message reach should be “earned, not bought.”
In its earnings release, Twitter stressed that the health of conversations on the platform continues to be a top priority as it works to reduce abuse and misinformation on the platform, including labeling tweets that falsely claim a win for candidates or encourage interference with election results or polling places.
CNN’s Kaya Yurieff contributed to this story.
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