• by Wayne Friedman , July 9, 2018

While virtually all media stocks witnessed gains on Monday -- along with the stock market indexes as a whole -- Twitter stood out with a noticeable decline, all due to some concern over suspended accounts.

Twitter stock was down 5.4%, and was as low at 8.6% mid-day -- closing at $44.14. A report in The Washington Post on Friday suggested Twitter doubled its usual number of account cancellations: “fake accounts” especially, which numbered 70 million.

On Monday, Ned Segal, Twitter CFO, said most of those suspensions were not “active” account variety.

He tweeted these accounts “have not been active on the platform for 30 days or more, or we catch them at sign up and they are never counted. If we removed 70M accounts from our reported metrics, you would hear directly from us.”

These accounts are not in Twitter's "monthly active user" metric -- a closely-watched measure of a social-media platform's performance.

In February, Twitter reported a fourth-quarter 2017 worldwide average of 336 million monthly active users; 68 million in the U.S.

There has been ongoing concerns on social-media platforms about “fake” social-media accounts.

After some troubles over the past few years, Twitter has seen its stock and business steadily recover -- up 50% over the past three months, 84% year to date and 137% year over year.