Twitter announces 'better-than-expected' fourth quarter and fiscal year 2020 results

But troubles mount in India as angry politicians promote rival Koo

Twitter on Tuesday reported its financial results for the fourth quarter and fiscal year 2020, beating earnings and revenue expectations of Wall Street analysts.

The company said its year-over-year total revenue growth for the fourth quarter increased 28 per cent to $1.29 billion. Twitter's average monetisable daily active usage (mDAU) in Q4 also increased by 27 per cent, to 192 million.

In the fourth quarter of 2020, the company's net income was $222 million, compared to the net income of $119 million in Q4 2019.

For the fiscal year 2020, Twitter's total revenue was $3.72 billion, up 7 per cent year over year. Costs and expenses in 2020 increased 19 per cent, to $3.69 billion, resulting in operating income of $27 million.

Twitter's net loss in 2020 was $1.14 billion, compared to a net income of $1.47 billion in 2019.

Jack Dorsey, Twitter's CEO, described 2020 as an "extraordinary year" for the company and said that they are "more proud than ever to serve the public conversation, especially in these unprecedented times".

Looking ahead, the company expects revenue to grow faster than expenses in 2021. It estimates the headcount to increase by more than 20 per cent this year, especially in product, engineering, research and design.

Twitter said that for the first quarter of 2021, it expects the revenue to be between $940 million and $1.04 billion.

"We have a global service. We are also not just dependent upon just news and politics being what drives Twitter," Dorsey said.

Dorsey also said that Twitter is "bigger than any one account".

Twitter's results come at the time when the company has angered the Indian government by refusing its request to remove more than 1,100 accounts and posts, which the government said were spreading misinformation about farmer protests.

Twitter stated on Wednesday that it cannot fully comply with orders from the Indian government as it believed they were not coherent with Indian law.

The company has permanently suspended some accounts while others have restricted access within India.

According to Twitter, the accounts run by journalists, activists, politicians and news media were not deleted, in line with its policy of defending freedom of speech.

Meanwhile, a social-media app Koo - claimed to be Twitter rival - has witnessed an increase in popularity as many politicians and others said they would start using Koo, following Twitter decision of not complying with the government order.

Koo said that the app's downloads had increased by about 10 times in the past two days, to over 3 million.

Social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook are currently under pressure to keep misinformation and fake news from spreading on their services, especially after the 2020 US presidential election.

Last month, Twitter banned former US President Donald Trump from posting any new messages through his accounts after his supporters stormed the Capitol building while lawmakers were attempting to tally votes for the election. It recently said the ban on Trump would continue indefinitely.

Facebook, Snapchat and several other social media networks announced similar bans on Trump over Capitol violence.

The bans came after critics said that social media platforms had failed to prevent the misinformation that led to violence in Washington DC.

In late January, Twitter announced the launch of a new pilot programme as part of the efforts to address misleading information on the platform to allow users to identify misleading information in tweets and to also add notes for informative context about the topic of the tweet.

The community-based initiative, called Twitter Birdwatch, is currently available only for a limited number of users in the United States.

Twitter said it hopes to build a "Birdwatchers" community that would eventually help to moderate tweets in its main product.