Twitter posts first-ever profit despite lingering bot issues

From CNET: There are millions of fake accounts tweeting, retweeting and liking many of the most high-profile accounts on Twitter. So what is the company going to do about it?

The issue's been bubbling under the surface at Twitter for years. But it was brought to the forefront by The New York Times, which uncovered companies that make their money by using bots -- automated computer programs sometimes posing as real people -- to inflate how many followers celebrities, business executives and, yes, even one of Twitter's own board members actually have. Twitter began purging millions of fake accounts in response.

It's hard to tell how many fake accounts are out there. A study released last year found that as much as 15 percent of active Twitter accounts were controlled by bots. Twitter says only about 5 percent of its accounts are run by bots.

The concerns about bots is just the latest black eye for Twitter, which struggles with everything from revenge porn and nonstop harassment among some users to concerns about how its service may have been used by Russian operatives in an attempt to influence the 2016 election.

But the fake accounts raise larger questions about Twitter's health as a company. Monthly active users is the metric that investors watch to determine the company's health. For the three months ended Dec. 31, it rose 4 percent to 330 million, continuing a trend of low, single-digit growth for the service. That overall figure is also nowhere close to rival Facebook, which counts 2.13 billion users.

The silver lining: Twitter on Thursday posted its first-ever profit of $91.1 million on $731.6 million of revenue.

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