Shareholders to discuss selling Twitter to users

Twitter will discuss whether it can and wants to sell itself to a group of users during a shareholder meeting in May. Thousands of users have signed a petition to this effect. Twitter’s board is against it.

The proposal is on the agenda, because each shareholder has a vote and can put proposals on the table. The petition to put Twitter in the hands of users has nearly 3,500 supporters at the time of writing. The users want to get their hands on Twitter, because they fear that a possible new owner will use the social medium for short-term profit and lose sight of the interests of users. There have been rumors for some time that Twitter is for sale.

In a government document, Twitter said the company has put the plan at the shareholders’ meeting. The person who initially proposed the plan says in an interview with tech site Recode that, for example, users can get a large part of the shares and thus get a few representatives on the board of the company in addition to voting rights.

The board of Twitter does not like the plan. She calls any investigation into the possibility a waste of time. Twitter currently has a market capitalization of around $10 billion.