Twitter disclosed a binding agreement to settle a class-action lawsuit, under which the social network will pay $809.5 million to resolve claims it provided misleading user-engagement info to investors.
The original lawsuit, filed in 2016 by a Twitter shareholder, alleged Dorsey and others including former CEO Dick Costolo and board member Evan Williams hid facts about Twitter’s slowing user growth while they sold their personal stock holdings “for hundreds of millions of dollars in insider profits.” The complaint alleged the company was tracking daily active users (DAUs) as the primary indicator of Twitter’s user engagement by early 2015 but didn’t reveal that to investors at the time (when it was reporting monthly active user figures).