
Twitter Says It Overstated Monthly-User Figures for 3 Years - hvo
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/26/technology/twitter-q3-earnings-trolls.html
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wyc
From a different trending article:

> San Francisco-based Twitter also disclosed that it had discovered an error
> in how it had measured its user base since 2014 and revised its estimates
> downward, but said the difference amounted to less than 1 percent.

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-twitter-
results/twitter-s...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-twitter-
results/twitter-says-it-could-turn-first-ever-profit-shares-surge-
idUSKBN1CV1JP)

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Top19
The amount of fraud in the statistics coming out of Silicon Valley companies
is really shocking.

Just finished the book “Chaos Monkey” by a former PM at Facebook, and he goes
into detail about how Facebook, and particularly Google with Google+, were
padding their numbers by 30, sometimes 40%. If anyone wonders how the bottom
will eventually fall out of some tech companies, it will be a real but not
terrible decline in usage, that leads them to more scrutiny, that then reveals
histories of fraud on a Wall Street level scale dating back over a decade.

Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley
[https://www.amazon.com/dp/0062458191/](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0062458191/)

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themagician
Facebook is the one that’s been the worst offender for damn near ever. Back in
the FB games days you had millions of users with dozens of accounts.
Click/like/fan fraud is beyond rampant. It’s really difficult to get a
positive ROI out of Facebook advertising. It’s a product used by damn near
everyone, but one that only actually works for small niches. But we all do it
because, “Well, you’ve gotta be on Facebook.”

20 years in and the only two ad products that really work universally are the
intent-based ads attached to search on Google and Amazon. Everything else is
just shit CPM awareness spam. Sometimes better than shit when used with
intelligent retargeting, but mostly shit.

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jack6e
> _Twitter said its data-retention policies made it unable to reconcile the
> figures for periods before last year’s fourth quarter._

Is Twitter really claiming that they do not store even aggregated data on
number of users for more than a year? Or does the data prior to that not have
any distinction between Twitter and third-party users that could be used to
correct their error? I would be amazed if a social media platform of that size
had such weak retention policies, even for their own sake. Maybe I am too used
to the paradigm of Google/FB where data is gold stored in Fort Knox.

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ben_jones
If I was in PR I'd probably swing it as "We derive analytics from normal
database records therefore we don't store analytics data _specifically_ but
can pull it when we need it _cough_ "

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scarface74
Well. At least they didn't claim that they couldn't gather statistics on the
salary of their current employees like Google did...

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carusooneliner
Isn't it funny they made this disclosure when they had upbeat information
(profit expected next quarter) to go along with it ? As of right now TWTR is
up 17%. I guess the disclosure is about past performance anyway, goes to show
how the stock market disregards the past as long as it doesn't have material
impact on the future. Also, as a client of Digits, I'm amused my app's user
activity made its way into TWTR's prior quarterly results.

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madamelic
They knew. They 100% knew exactly what they were doing and didn't want to
correct it.

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samstave
Twitter has the best userbase. The most massive user base. Only the best. The
fake reports of our userbase were just sad, fake reports. and youre a fake
commentor. Twitter has the best user-counters in the world, many people say
so. Believe me. And, not even Obama had as many users as twitter. SAD.

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bad_user
You're supposed to end with an exclamation mark. Sad!

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whathaschanged
Willful ignorance, no matter how they try to frame it, is still fraud. They
propped up their company to look bigger than it is, repeatedly.

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tristanj
If you read the SEC filing it says they only overstated their quarterly MAUs
by 0.6%. If they wanted to make their company look bigger, why would they
inflate with such a tiny number? I doubt this was intentional.

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tomc1985
Dishonesty in business should be fatal

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tristanj
It's more dishonest to cover this kind of information up.

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ellerybangs
It's a bit sad that they've been propping up there numbers so heavily and
still failing to generate capitol. Will this even impact there survivability?

