Twitter Inc. Chief Executive Jack Dorsey is facing calls to abandon his role as CEO of the embattled social media network amid a bot scandal and a lack of robust user growth.
Earlier this month, University of Southern California and Indiana University issued a research report that showed as many as 15% of Twitter accounts are actually algorithms doing all that tweeting and retweeting. This figure is nearly twice that of Twitter’s own estimate that as many as 8.5% of its user accounts are bots. That’s is particularly troublesome for Twitter since its already having a tough time with advertisers.
Dorsey Returned to Turn Company Around Dorsey returned to the helm in 2015 with a charge to turn around the struggling social media network, and since then there’s been more bad news for Twitter: Twitter’s revenue was hurt by weak advertising sales, totaling just $638 million, marking a slight annual decline. The poor earnings results and the bot scandal comes amid concerns by advertisers about the placements of ads on Twitter.
