Twitter Says It Overstated Monthly-User Figures For 3 Years

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source): Twitter said on Thursday that it had overstated its monthly-user figures since 2014 after mistakenly including data from third-party applications in its counting. The revelation came as the company reported that its net loss had narrowed in the third quarter and that its number of daily active users had risen 14 percent. The company said it had discovered that its measure of monthly active users had been improperly including figures from third-party applications that used Digits, a software-development program. Digits is part of the Fabric mobile application platform that Twitter sold to Alphabet, Google's parent company, this year. Digits allowed third-party applications to send authentication messages through Twitter's systems and did not reflect activity on the Twitter platform, the company said. As a result, the company lowered the number of monthly active users by two million for the first and second quarters of this year and by one million for the fourth quarter of 2016. Twitter said its data-retention policies made it unable to reconcile the figures for periods before last year's fourth quarter.

IPO

[SimonTheSoundMan]

So, stats were overstated around the time they had their IPO.

Re:

[Man On Pink Corner]

You mean, "So, stats were overstated around the time they had their IPO. Sad!"

The First Desktop Publishing Software Was...

[dryriver]

...launched in 1985. It could combine images and text in various ways and do something magically called LAYOUT. Now if Twitter hired a few software engineers to plug a little DTP engine into its system, people could post something far more interesting that 140 character Tweets - messages with customized layout where text, images, vector and other digital wonders we've had since the 80s could come together on the internet in a much more appealing package. I really do not understand how long Twitter wants to be stuck with SMS-like mini messages with a rectangular image posted under it.

Re:

[alvinrod]

If you've looked at the average twitter user, I'm not sure they could handle the sophisticated tool you're proposing. It would be like handing a retarded chimp a Stratovarius. Allowing 140 characters was clearly a mistake. 80 would have sufficed.

*cough* *cough*

[GLMDesigns]

bullsh!t

Re:

[PoopJuggler]

"Mistakenly"

Three years?

[93 Escort Wagon]

No, Twitter's been overrated for far longer than that...

Not very surprised

[CustomBuild]

I doubt anyone is surprised. There have rumors, circulating for years, of this exact issue. In fact I would bet that any revised numbers, would also be inflated, based on bot usage.

Re:

[WillAffleckUW]

when did the stature of limitations run out on lying on the ipo?

When Trump became President and the SEC became toothless.

It is still private, right?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Its their money.

If they used the sky high valuations created by these faked numbers and sell out to any publicly traded company, then we should chase these owners and throw them in jail.

The limited liability corporation idea has run amok. Now the courts are giving private corporations rights of real citizens, like freedom of speech, spending money = speech, religious beliefs etc, it is high time we reverse the trend and throw a few bastards in jail to reign them in.

Re:

[PoopJuggler]

So privately held companies are allowed to commit fraud?

Re:

[Colin Castro]

Who are the defrauding?

Shocked!

[UnknownSoldier]

/cynical I'm shocked, shocked I tell you, that yet-another-corporation lied about their stats.

Users or Accounts?

[eepok]

Because that's where the BIG inflation is coming from. People with multiple (business with hundreds) of Twitter accounts. I'm pretty sure Twitter were to release how many active HUMAN users there are in their system, their ad revenue just might take a nose dive.

And their stock went up 20%?

[ayesnymous]

The reason their stock's been crashing the last couple years is because of poor user numbers. Now they state that even those poor numbers were overstated, and the stock soars? Makes total sense.

Potential liabilities?

[The Cynical Critic]

If this had been going on during their IPO, which took place a year before the misreporting began, then that probably would have been a pretty clear cut case of securities fraud. It's less obvious now, but I wouldn't be all that surprised if a competent prosecutor could be able to get a conviction for securities fraud out of this and how long it went on for.

Still, it makes their claim of a 14% growth in active users pretty suspicious...

Fake activity

[Bender Unit 22]

I tried out Twitter for a while and have tried other platforms as like Instagram etc.
It seems to me that most of what happens on platforms like this are that when you post something, they get some "likes" that comes from accounts that use automated systems that trigger on keywords releated to what they are trying to sell/get them famous. It happened with every post.