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Twitter’s user woes are similar to those of Facebook Inc., which also has been plagued by manipulation, robot accounts and unrest about the growing influence of social media in the culture. Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey has said his priority is to reduce abusive conversations on the platform and the company said its machine-learning algorithms are identifying more than 9 million potential spam or automated accounts a week.

I honestly don't understand what these shareholders want.

Same with Facebook.

Are they selling because "user" numbers are down a sliver? (Both Facebook and Twitter coincidentally seem to have experienced a 1 million active user reduction per month in the last month). It feels as though respective drops of 20% and 17% are absolutely disproportionate to that tiny number of users leaving.

So, then, is this the impact of Cambridge Analytica et al? Does money care whether CA helped pave the way for Trump and Brexit? I don't think so. Doesn't seem likely at all.

In fact, I could see "money" / "capital", whatever you want to call it, cheering them on. The rich have nothing to lose from this short term.

So, what is it actually? Is it in fact "the rich" withdrawing their money as part of some sort of punishment for these platforms, as they clean up their act?

It's not like Twitter or Facebook haven't tried absolutely EVERYTHING to avoid doing this. They harbored bots, spam and fake accounts until the very bitter end, when the PR scales just about tipped in favour of cleaning up their acts, because some governments (mostly the EU) started rattling their sabers.

I wish, oh do I wish for this to simply be "they treat their customers like the data-cows that they are, ripe for milking by every shady organisation, government and security agency imaginable, they are confessing to their sins and suffering the consequences rightfully, which will turn society back onto a path of common goals and shared prosperity".

But that's not it. Is it...

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