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Twitter Says It Overstated Monthly-User Figures for 3 Years

40 points by hvo 9y ago

madamelic 9y ago
They knew. They 100% knew exactly what they were doing and didn't want to correct it.
- samstave 9y ago
  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.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - bad_user 9y ago
    You're supposed to end with an exclamation mark. Sad!
- mtgx 9y ago
  Exactly. There's no way Twitter didn't know it had a bot problem. Because pretty much everyone else knew that. It's only now that the government and media are putting pressure on Twitter to deal with "propaganda accounts" that the company is finally willing to remove those bots, which will diminish its number of "users." Also, if Twitter's analytics are so poor that it can't tell that a good percentage of its accounts are bots, then I feel sorry for the advertisers buying Twitter's pitch.
- chimeracoder 9y ago
  > They knew. They 100% knew exactly what they were doing and didn't want to correct it. ...they committed outright fraud for three years, all to boost their MAUs by less than 1%[0]? All without getting caught? Committing fraud of that scale and getting away with it for that long is actually pretty difficult. It's hard to imagine why a company that's already experiencing growth in every single quarter during this time period (except one) would take such a great risk, and still end up with numbers that are basically a rounding error away from the correct ones. Occam's razor: they discovered a mistake which had very little impact, and then they corrected it. [0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-twitter-results/twitter-says-it-could-turn-first-ever-profit-shares-surge-idUSKBN1CV1JP https://www.reuters.com/article/us-twitter-results/twitter-s...
jack6e 9y ago
> 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.
- samstave 9y ago
  So, recall when it was stated that twitter was connecting its firehose to the library of congress for all tweets to be stored in there? Yeah - WHY would this country want that? Oh, I see now - twitter is crack for lunatic presidents and they now need to store that there... Sentiment mining is the new hotness.
- ben_jones 9y ago
  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"
  - scarface74 9y ago
    Well. At least they didn't claim that they couldn't gather statistics on the salary of their current employees like Google did...
whathaschanged 9y ago
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.
- tristanj 9y ago
  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.
Top19 9y ago
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/
- themagician 9y ago
  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.
- QAPereo 9y ago
  The amount of fraud in the statistics coming out of Silicon Valley companies is really shocking. Really? There’s an HBO show in its fourth season predicated largely on the premise of SV hypocrisy and bad behavior.
carusooneliner 9y ago
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.
tomc1985 9y ago
Dishonesty in business should be fatal
- tristanj 9y ago
  It's more dishonest to cover this kind of information up.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
ellerybangs 9y ago
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?
wyc 9y ago
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-says-it-could-turn-first-ever-profit-shares-surge-idUSKBN1CV1JP https://www.reuters.com/article/us-twitter-results/twitter-s...

40 points by hvo 9y ago

madamelic 9y ago

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

samstave 9y ago
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.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- bad_user 9y ago
  You're supposed to end with an exclamation mark. Sad!
mtgx 9y ago
Exactly. There's no way Twitter didn't know it had a bot problem. Because pretty much everyone else knew that. It's only now that the government and media are putting pressure on Twitter to deal with "propaganda accounts" that the company is finally willing to remove those bots, which will diminish its number of "users." Also, if Twitter's analytics are so poor that it can't tell that a good percentage of its accounts are bots, then I feel sorry for the advertisers buying Twitter's pitch.
chimeracoder 9y ago
> They knew. They 100% knew exactly what they were doing and didn't want to correct it. ...they committed outright fraud for three years, all to boost their MAUs by less than 1%[0]? All without getting caught? Committing fraud of that scale and getting away with it for that long is actually pretty difficult. It's hard to imagine why a company that's already experiencing growth in every single quarter during this time period (except one) would take such a great risk, and still end up with numbers that are basically a rounding error away from the correct ones. Occam's razor: they discovered a mistake which had very little impact, and then they corrected it. [0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-twitter-results/twitter-says-it-could-turn-first-ever-profit-shares-surge-idUSKBN1CV1JP https://www.reuters.com/article/us-twitter-results/twitter-s...

jack6e 9y ago

> 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.

samstave 9y ago
So, recall when it was stated that twitter was connecting its firehose to the library of congress for all tweets to be stored in there? Yeah - WHY would this country want that? Oh, I see now - twitter is crack for lunatic presidents and they now need to store that there... Sentiment mining is the new hotness.
ben_jones 9y ago
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"
- scarface74 9y ago
  Well. At least they didn't claim that they couldn't gather statistics on the salary of their current employees like Google did...

whathaschanged 9y ago

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.

tristanj 9y ago
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.

Top19 9y ago

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/

themagician 9y ago
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.
QAPereo 9y ago
The amount of fraud in the statistics coming out of Silicon Valley companies is really shocking. Really? There’s an HBO show in its fourth season predicated largely on the premise of SV hypocrisy and bad behavior.

carusooneliner 9y ago

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.

tomc1985 9y ago

Dishonesty in business should be fatal

tristanj 9y ago
It's more dishonest to cover this kind of information up.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

ellerybangs 9y ago

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?

wyc 9y ago

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