Twitter Admits It Overstated Users for Years (axios.com) 113
Twitter on Thursday reported mixed first-quarter earnings, missing Wall Street expectations on revenue but adding users. It also admitted to over-counting some monetizable daily active users between Q1 2019 and Q4 2021. From a report: Analysts were expecting the tech giant to post weak results, given that its board finalized a takeover deal with Elon Musk earlier this week. This could be Twitter's last earnings report as a publicly traded company. The company brought in $1.2 billion in revenue last quarter, just shy of analyst estimates. Other ad-supported tech giants also missed Q1 revenue expectations in response to macroeconomic headwinds impacting the ad market. Twitter also said it accidentally over-counted the number of monetizable daily active users because of a feature that allowed people to link multiple separate accounts together in order to conveniently switch between them. It counted those two separate accounts as two users for more than three years.
First of many admissions (Score:5, Interesting)
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Twitter also said it accidentally over-counted the number of monetizable daily active users
"Accidentally". Yeah, right.
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Just like how companies often "accidentally" over-bill me but rarely accidentally under-bill. Murphy has a quantum spin?
Re: First of many admissions (Score:2)
Re: First of many admissions (Score:2)
No, it sounds to me like the grocery stores use software/database that automatically removes discounts based on the end-date supplied when the discount was keyed into the database, and the reason most errors are higher prices because the store failed to properly key in the discount in the first place.
I suspect most "over charges" were items that should have been on sale but weren't.
Re:First of many admissions (Score:5, Insightful)
So pretty much the corporate equivalent of "SO LONG SUCKER!!"
I'm curious to know if this goes to the level of possible fraud charges by the SEC. Twitter didn't seem to falsify account statements, but their stock trading price is influenced by subscriber growth or decline, and it's definitely worth less if there's less users on the platform than before the buyout announcement.
Re:First of many admissions (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:First of many admissions (Score:5, Informative)
What do you mean by 'pay the interest on the takeover anyway'?
Musk is borrowing $25B of the $44B he is paying for Twitter.
He will need to pay interest on that loan. The interest will likely be around 1% over T-bills. So about 4%.
4% of $25B is $1B in annual interest payments.
That is more than Twitter's current EBITDA.
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He will need to pay interest on that loan. The interest will likely be around 1% over T-bills. So about 4%.
I'm curious if he plans to subsidize Twitter with SpaceX and Tesla? It would be pretty "interesting" for the US Government to pay for a launch and then Musk turn around and deposit that check on this loan.
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I'm curious if he plans to subsidize Twitter with SpaceX and Tesla?
It is illegal for Musk to do that with Tesla since it is a public company.
He can't do it with SpaceX either without the consent of the other shareholders, and they have no reason to consent.
Musk had to sell Tesla stock to raise $11B to pay his taxes, so he will need to sell $19B more to fund the Twitter buyout. Tesla stock has already tanked by $120B in anticipation of the sell-off.
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Tesla is public so I don't think he can do that unilaterally. I suppose Tesla can pay Twitter for services but that expeniture is on the books of the company so it's at the discretion of shareholders who can make their opinion known.
SpaceX is private but still has investors, it's just not publically listed so similar situations apply. SpaceX especially looks to be needing all it's revnue put back into the company, they have a lot of capital intensive projects happening.
Re: First of many admissions (Score:2)
Possibly, also possible that other considerations were made such as the source of funding for future projects and that the rate is significantly sweeter.
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Your first assumption is that the riches billionaires of the planet owning and controlling trillions in assets pay the same annual interest rate as you and I do on their mortgage, and not just a little over the Fed rate of currently 0.25 percent, but you expect them to pay 16 times as much at 4.00 percent.
That alone makes every conclusion you draw on financial matters highly dubious.
Unless you have a solid source on what the richest people on the planet pay in interest rates for their mega projects, it is a
Re: First of many admissions (Score:2)
No.
As noted in TFS:
The company brought in $1.2 billion in revenue last quarter, just shy of analyst estimates.
That puts the annual interest expense at less than 25% of annual revenue.
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While I agree with you, I'm not sure anyone would care when the new owner paid well over current stock price.
In this case, it was probably more on Elon to do that due diligence regarding value padding.
Re:First of many admissions (Score:5, Interesting)
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Not a done deal yet. In fact, market is now only 80% sure with about a 5 buck a share discount from the offer. I'd not be surprised if the over-counting means musk gets the billion instead of pays a billion for not completing the transaction. And would not surprise me if he is already selling shares at a profit. I could see him profiting several billion from not buying twitter. I wonder if that happens if Jack D will still be friends. Jack was scheduled to collect a billion from the deal. Playing monopoly as only billionaires can. Now musk is joking about buying coke and putting the cocaine back in.
It was an overcount of 1-2 million users [theverge.com], about 1%. Important, but not enough to really affect the share price I suspect.
More important Musk is breaking the acquisition agreement by disparaging current members of the company [nationalpost.com]. Oh, another fun fact from that article:
Last October, Musk criticized Missy Cummings, a Duke University professor who was hired by the U.S. vehicle safety regulator as an advisor, in a tweet that was followed by personal attacks online on Cummings. A longtime critic of Tesla’s dri
Re: First of many admissions (Score:1)
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Do tell! Is it a misnomer?
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...in a tweet that was followed by personal attacks online on Cummings. A longtime critic of Tesla’s driver assistant software, Cummings subsequently deleted her Twitter account.
So Elon Musk's understanding of free speech seems to including using your influence to get people to shut up.
(Musk) “Objectively, her track record is extremely biased against Tesla"
(Cummings) “Happy to sit down and talk with you anytime"
I believe that right there, is the entire jist of this "attack" and response. Elon felt like he was making a factual (and objective) statement. Cummings response, simply challenged Elon.
[...]
Regarding personal attacks, is every famous person not supposed to say anything online or in person now, for fear of their fans overreacting? How is a famous person supposed to know they even have an "army" of enraged bullying assholes waiting on standby for their next "critic"? Seems quite unfair because it can get quite insane. You can manipulate and destroy a lot when the damn "army" (or an anti army) of a celebrity literally becomes more powerful and famous than the very entity they exist for.
He directly attacked her integrity, leading to very predictable personal attacks against her by his fans, and then didn't even bother to speak out to restrict those fans. A Tesla fan who bullied her off the platform would be entirely justified in believing that they were carrying out Elon Musk's will.
In my opinion, when you choose an action that has an extremely predictable (and avoidable) consequence then you bear responsibility for those consequences.
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- I wouldn't want to hold stock an any company beholden to Elon Musk any longer than necessary to make a profit.
Why? Seriously, you've indicated you have no problem making a profit off something he's done, the indication being he's capable of making a profit. So why no longer? IT's almost of version of the apocryphal "Madame, we've established what you are, we're just haggling over the price." anecdote.
CEO and execs lieing adout the numbers? (Score:2)
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When is the last time you heard of ANY CEO getting in trouble with the SEC for fudging numbers (beyond a slap on the wrist)? They are all "the Man".
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Yesterday, Archegos
Re:CEO and execs lieing adout the numbers? (Score:5, Informative)
When is the last time you heard of ANY CEO getting in trouble with the SEC for fudging numbers
Enron CEO Jeffery Skilling spent 12 years in prison.
Re: CEO and execs lieing adout the numbers? (Score:2)
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well now that the news is out, the quarterly filings had fraudulent data in them. I hope they've lawyered up because there'll be a lot of people going to jail.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"Yeah, not as many users as we said . . ." (Score:5, Insightful)
No, more likely it was the same scenario as hit Yahoo years ago; where they were dependent on number of unique users viewing ads to bill advertisers so they chose to ignore the BOTS hitting pages to bump up the view numbers so they could claim tens-of-millions of unique views when they new it was BOTS.
So when the time came to show the logs, say for a audit for a new acquisition; you have to admit that you cooked the books and fight off the paid advertisers you over-billed.
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Re:"Yeah, not as many users as we said . . ." (Score:5, Insightful)
Downmodding or disliking is meant when you don't like what you've had to read because you'd have to activate your brain or deal with the fact someone disagrees with you. It is not meant to punish someone for being abusive or using faulty premises/bad logical constructs to make a point.
Haven't you received this decade's memo on how we do things on the internet?
The moderation on this site still is slightly usable but it's by a hair's width. Most of the rest of the net, moderation just exists for engagement. I am sure several large sites would easily lose a third of its users if they removed likes and dislikes as a means to be someone... however tragic that notion might be.
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Reddit is 98% useless IMO.
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I am sure several large sites would easily lose a third of its users if they removed likes and dislikes as a means to be someone..
Absolutely. The whole point to Twitter is the gamification of discourse. Without the gratification of scoring points, who's going to play? How would anybody know who won?
I don't think you need to do that here (Score:5, Interesting)
Being that this is a private purchase unless Musk's financiers demand more audits (unlikely, they're probably in it for the same reason Musk is) then they could just skip all the audits depending on Musk's whims.
Now if Musk was buying Twitter with the intention of using the revenue to pay the loans from the financiers, and they were expecting to be paid back, then yeah, there'd be audit's up the wazoo. But if that was the case nobody would be buying Twitter as the risk is way, way too high.
At the end of the day Twitter's just a website, and all it takes for it to become irrelevant is for it's userbase to age out. And all it takes for that to happen is for young folks to associate Twitter with their parents.
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Considering Bezos bought the Post for a "mere" $250 million it looks like an absolute bargain in comparison.
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Except so far Bezos hasn't had much to say about how the Washington Post is run, at least not editorially. Seems like he bought it more because he believes in the institution of newspapers. Compare to Musk, who seems to have bought Twitter mostly so he can continue to shit and vomit all over it.
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It's both of course. The bots are a blessing and a curse, and the goal has to be to kick only the malignant ones off of the service because otherwise the numbers will drop too much. But yes of course they're counting idle users in their total userbase, everyone does it. Any time anyone announces anything other than active users (e.g. 60 days or less) then they're lying.
Re: "Yeah, not as many users as we said . . ." (Score:1)
Re: "Yeah, not as many users as we said . . ." (Score:2)
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No business model either (Score:3)
Probably because they counted guys like me, who signed up literally the day it went online. I looked once, couldn't figure out anything it could do to improve my life, and ignored it thereafter. The one time I went back, I found out that (at least, at that time) it was impossible to delete my account - so I guess I still count as a Twitter user.
It's annoying, having to delete their preinstalled bloatware from every new cell phone I've bought since then (except Google's Pixel 3, I don't remember if they preinstalled Titter on that one). I don't even remember my handle anymore, but I'm quite certain the account is still active. I'm equally certain I'm listed as an account holder.
I had the same experience.
Twitter was looking for a buyer some months back, and I was thinking about their business model(*) and... couldn't come up with one.
There is no economy of scale with twitter, there's little apparent development or management needed (some devs to manage customer service and weed out undesirables, some developers to add edit and maybe encryption), and little place for revenue. You *might* be able to sell ads, you *might* be able to charge an annual fee for blue check accounts, you *m
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If you mean "as a financial investment", I'll accept that as correct. (It's well out of my area of knowledge, and I don't even have a Twitter account.) It's my guess that he's bought it as a "large soapbox" to promote his views. That's a kind of investment.
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They do sell ads and there is some revenue. But you're correct on many of your other points.
The core product of Twitter is actually not bad. It's an easy way to share short messages and pictures with people. It's easy to use. But there's not much else in terms of features - especially features people want. Features people might pay for - even if it's just $2 a month.
It's not easy to find communities of accounts with something in common, for example. Yeah, there's the hashtag thing, but not every post or acc
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Gettr are rolling out live video streaming. That is kind of cool. If Twitter had that functionality it could be a competitor to Twitch
Twitter did have Periscope for a number of years and while it was sorta popular it never really seemed to take off and they seemed to squander the purchase. I think it speaks to the larger issue that Twitter's popularity and kind-of curse is their penchant to not monkey with the formula much but due to that can't really expand.
People like Twitter for Tweeting and not much else. Streaming video, audio, spaces, vines were all kinda fun for while but people on Twitter don't seem to care.
Video clips work well
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Musk himself stated that you don't buy twitter as an investment. I think he's spot on.
Honestly buying Twitter sounds like something with more coke and money than brains or decency does about five rails into a coke bender.
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yeah we all know the official benchmark of a bender is 10 rails minimum.
5 is just getting warmed up.
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I'll say this - Twitter has 7000 employees which is *easily* 6000 too many. I'd be baffled if I was unable to run it with 100 people. It's obvious that they have a *lot* of people who are tasked with weeding out wrongthink, and those people are hopefully already job hunting.
Re: No business model either (Score:1)
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Apparently one of the ideas that Musk is bringing is to charge for tweet embeds. It's simple and targets other press outlets for monetization of what is published on Twitter's system - seems like it's actually a pretty good way to leverage the biggest user base out there, without putting the hammer to the user base.
Downside: enforcing it could get nasty because screenshotting is easy and could result in a whole lot of C&D takedown letters being sent, which isn't going to look good when your whole thing
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You bring a good point. Now the question for investors becomes whether or not they should hold social media companies accountable for failing to report active accounts rather than "accounts". I'm sure there's a lot of dead people on Facebook too who still count as "users". At some point their brag-for-profit user counts will exceed the living population.
Again, someone has to be powerful and ethical enough to call them on those lies. It will happen otherwise.
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What kind of cheap phones are you buying that come with twitter? I'm cheap and only spend about a hundred bucks on a phone and once one came with Facebook, which I immediately deleted. Google apps, a help app, a gesture app and a radio app seems to be normal on my cheap phones, Moto E's.
Doesn't matter (Score:2)
Whatever the case it doesn't work, everyone knows it doesn't work, but the advertising industry is too large to let go. Remember, it takes two to tango, and large company's marketing departments aren't going to just go quietly into the good night.
It might sting a little at first. (Score:3)
It won’t be fun at first but watching the most worthless parts of the commercial web shrivel up and die will be very entertaining.
Once the obsession with eyeballs, impressions, and SEO ceases to be the driving factor behind what’s developed maybe things will be more like they were in the good ole days. I also wouldn’t mind Facebook dying in a fire so I never see GraphQL ever again.
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How do we get people to start paying for products more is the question I suppose.
I know Musk has the plan to use subscriptions more but I doubt he's going to pull the atom bomb and make it a full pay to play site even though that's what will have to happen for us to kick the ad habit. I think for to happen on a mass scale people just need more disposable income but that's a systemic issue. There are already too many streaming services competing for limited dollars, add every other ad-supported site to the
Musk plan is simple (Score:4, Insightful)
I know Musk has the plan to use subscriptions more but I doubt he's going to pull the atom bomb and make it a full pay to play site
It's extremely easy for Musk to convert Twitter into an all-pay site with no ads:
1) Introduce Edit button
2) You have to be a subscriber to be able to use it.
3) Subscribers get 100 more characters per message.
Boom!
Actually there's a hidden step in there that I'm pretty sure will happen:
4) Cut Twitter staff by 50% by cutting dead weight of project managers and entire moderation department, leave all IT support people in place with substantial raises, and the people working on the edit button.
And as he said, he's already saving a lot of money by setting Twitter board salaries to zero...
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Edit button is good but not that important, it's a bit of a pain to delete something to repost it but that's about it. It's convienence and it has to have limits to work.
More characters is nice but just shortens threads. Again, a convienence but doesn't fundamentally change the way people use the site.
Throw on top of there the fact that like 25% of users accounts for like 97% of all tweets and your users who would want to pay are now 1/4. Maybe it's enough, I'm sure Musk has some stats nerds working on t
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Edit button is good but not that important
A vast army of people who have been demanding it say otherwise.
I am telling you it is a massive marketing boon to offer that as a perk.
Paying for verification is probably the strongest thing, people love vanity.
Yes, totally agree there, great point and that would be probably a stronger draw than the edit button which I laid out have in jest, half seriously...
your users who would want to pay are now 1/4
My guess is that's more than enough since advertising rates are p
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Yeah I am not saying these things are valuable it's just are they valuable enough to keep the doors open, especially if the site in fact grows. If it was $10 a year i'd jump in no problem. If it's $5 a month I'm gonna take a pause, I might get more enjoyment out of a new video game that year than an edit button. Interesting to see where his people find that line for people they think is going to work.
Moderation is also tricky though, even just compliance with laws is likely untenable. Twitter's value i
Something changed on April 26 (Score:3)
Follower counts for many Conservatives jumped
https://twitter.com/Nick_Rizzu... [twitter.com]
Was Twitter monkeying with them prior or is it bots or ???
Re:Something changed on April 26 (Score:5, Interesting)
I think it's just as simple as the Musk news has brought a lot of new interest in the site, especially from conservatives who felt it wasn't worth their time.
With the news of the purchase and what they feel will be an adapted ToS more suited to their point-of-view a slew of new signups likely occurred and unsurprisingly they end up following a lot of the conservative pundits who have been in support of the Musk purchase and what it could bring.
It's a bit pre-mature as it sounds like the deal may take up to 6 months before it fully closes and even probably more time before he gets the people he would want in there to start making changes. Also there's actually no guarantee this deal actually fully happens. It's pretty likely but both sides have the option to back out between now and closing time.
Twitter has no actual reason to stop conservatives from signing up, they drive a lot of engagement and engagement brings views, views bring ads, ads bring money.
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Conservatives were the ones against Twitter and are now interested in it? Twitter is full of "conservatives". Your view of the world as black and white is very simplistic.
Conservatives do not support lies. Authoritarians do, oligarchs do, and those that profit from the trickle down economy of dependence created by them will support the lies they arbitrarily spew. There is more than "left" and "right", kukservative and libtard, or whatever is current...
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If I polled the general public on their opinion of Twitter what political affiliation is going to have the more negative one of the site?
I'm not moralizing about why it's that way I am just being descriptive.
In the case of a lot thing's political in America we can generalize to "liberal" and "conservative", especially when we are speaking, you know, generally.
Yes there's an entire magical rainbow spectrum of thoughts in those boxes and lot's of them blur together but you know, language has lot's of shortcut
A bunch of actual Nazis tried signing up (Score:3)
I don't think we'll see the far right extremists back on Twitter. Germany won't allow it and nobody's going to abandon Germany over freeze peach. But I do think we'll see more folks walking right up to the line and even occasionally stepping over it.
And, well, they'll be people on the right wing. Because they always are. The left hasn't bothered with violence since the 70s. We gave up on it when we saw what happened in the USSR &
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I'm having trouble figuring out if the right-wingers are the good guys in your story, or if they are the bad guys.
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Who didn't see this coming? (Score:2, Insightful)
Twitter has been mass banning people on the right for years. I've reported blue checks for making not so subtle calls to direct violence and Twitter responded with a notice saying they investigated the tweet and found no rule violation.
Unlike the Meta properties or YouTube, Twitter has never been accountable to a board that likes making money and pleasing shareholders.
My guess is that the real reason the leadership is afraid of transparency is that it's going to reveal the extent to which the activists have
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I've reported blue checks
Lol, Sean King is twitter royalty. He's basically unbannable.
Only Now... (Score:2)
This is only now coming out because of the due diligence being conducted for the sale of twitter. I would have some seriously concerns about this purchase now if I was Musk, he should have a way out due to this failure.
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Or at least a partial refund equivalent to the percentage of false users vs real users.
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At a minimum, the former board and executives of Twatter need to have a nice, long class-action suit brought for defrauding shareholders.
This is probably why Dorsey is changing his tune all of a sudden, he perpetuated a lot of lies and is liable for them.
Grab your popcorn.
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He said in his Ted interview he doesn't care about the financials of twitter at all. He's buying it for the free speech potential.
Yup (Score:4)
Just as I predicted yesterday, and was modded down for, Twitter has been up to all sorts of shenanigans. The mysterious loss of followers for Left leaning accounts and gains for Right leaning accounts, far outside the normal range of change. Now we find out that Twitter has been juicing the number of users, and defrauding advertisers that pay based on how many users they perceive that the platform has.
Why do you suppose all of this is coming to light at the exact time that Musk prepares to take the company private? Obviously this is an attempt to torpedo the valuation of the company by planting seeds of doubt over the legitimacy of the platform.
It seems to me that the current Board of Directors at Twitter has a lot of questions to answer. How long have they known about this deception? When were they planning on disclosing this...or did it just conveniently come to light after Musk finalized the deal? Given that this information is damaging to Twitter as a company what reparations are due to Musk and the current shareholders? Will the SEC be prosecuting any of the board members, as this seems a clear violation of securities regulations?
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I saw a Mark Hamill post someone put on Imgur saying he had 2000 followers vanish overnight like 2 days ago with other people commenting the same thing happened to them.
Re:Yup (Score:5, Interesting)
Barack Obama - 300,000 followers disappear almost overnight
Marjorie Taylor Greene - 100,000 new followers in 24 hours
Donald Trump Jr - 250,000 new followers overnight
Joe Biden - 66,000 followers disappear in one day
Typically account followers will go up or down +-1,000 per day. I really hate to be the one to cloud this argument with facts but something doesn't smell right about this.
Just think about how the number of followers effects your influence on Twitter. The more followers you have the bigger your megaphone when you tweet something.
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Barack Obama - 300,000 followers disappear almost overnight
Marjorie Taylor Greene - 100,000 new followers in 24 hours
Donald Trump Jr - 250,000 new followers overnight
Joe Biden - 66,000 followers disappear in one day
Typically account followers will go up or down +-1,000 per day. I really hate to be the one to cloud this argument with facts but something doesn't smell right about this.
Just think about how the number of followers effects your influence on Twitter. The more followers you have the bigger your megaphone when you tweet something.
My hunch is that progressives are leaving Twitter. I mean Musk is already engaging with right wing extremists. I wouldn't be shocked if within the year there's a mass exodus from Twitter to a politically progressive competitor, which will be a bit of a shame since Twitter as it exists now does have many political views.
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I mean Musk is already engaging with right wing extremists.
What do you mean by "engaging" and who are these "right wing extremists"?
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I dunno - maybe. But it still just doesn't add up. Even if that were to explain the loss of followers for left leaning folks how does that explain Trump Jr getting 250K new followers? Right wingers are all joining Twitter en masse because of Musk? I seriously doubt that.
For the longest time Musk was a hero of the left. Electric cars, saving the planet, all that. And now he's being grouped in with "right wing extremists", in your words. Can you cite an example of anyone like that?
If anything Musk is more of
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A lot of accounts were banned for just three words - "Hunter Biden Laptop." Happened to Tim Allen and many others. Now even the NY Times admits the Biden laptop was real all along, well after the election of course. Still no outrage from them about what's on it and the corruption at all levels of Government here and places like Ukraine.
2000 fewer people for a guy like Hamill shouldn't be a concern. I'd think he would have a lot of followers. On Youtube (sometimes called screwtube) I've seen a channel lose 3
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There is that. Some people make their YT channel a business.
You can fight back BTW. Just load ublock. Whenever I use someone's machine that doesn't have that and need to look at YT for something.... it really sucks.
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Have any evidence?
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Evidence of.... ? People aren't a mind reader.
Evidence of the banning for the three words is a simple google search. Add tim alllen for that story. Not hard.
YT - here is a story - https://vidiq.com/blog/post/wh... [vidiq.com] . If you watch YT you'll hear content creators comment on it from time to time. However, it's not like I take a screen shot of a channel by date to show this is happening. Even if it did, could people have un-subscribed due to something they said or did? It still would be little more than anecdota
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Evidence of the banning for the three words is a simple google search. Add tim alllen for that story. Not hard.
Well, where is it then? Sounds like complete nonsense to me.
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I don't know why it is mysterious? A lot of left wing people quit Twitter because Musk and a lot of right wing people joined Twitter because of Musk.
Many more left wing people pledged to stay for now, but those drops where still a small fraction of those left wing account followers.
bot bot (Score:1)
The "monetizable users" metric is the reason Twitter is happy to allow bots to persist on the network in huge numbers. Every bot counts as a user.
Whatever you think about Elon Musk it will be interesting to see what happens when/if they move away from an ad-based model. Presumably there will be some kind of pseudonymous public key based identity management, probably with a small cryptocurrency stake that disappears in the case of bad behavior.
'Overstated' (Score:2)
That's funny, in most businesses this would simply be called 'lying'.
Oh, and probably 'fraud'.
And maybe 'actionable'/
I'm so back (Score:1)
"I have the most users, beliebe me! Trillions come to see and admire me. The line is so long they have to rent boats and ships, big beautiful clean ships. Jealous looser CNN copies my tweets and puts their name on them. Bigly cheaters. #MTGA!"
And so forth (Score:2)
It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.
The rats are scurrying. They are aids burning reams of paper to cover their misdeeds as the liberators approach.
First stage: anger
Second stage: panic
Third stage: coping and obfuscating misdeeds
Fourth stage: investigation and exposure
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But Jesus Dorsey wouldn't lie (Score:1)
Accidentally... Sure... (Score:2)
If it had been a couple of months, I could buy it was an accident. A couple of years... yeah... no.