Twitter Admits Overcounting Audience for 3 Years, Nearly 2M in 2021

Twitter has said it overstated its audience figures for almost three years, last year by nearly 2 million users, a Financial Times report said Thursday (April 28).

This comes as the social media giant reported its first quarterly results since billionaire Elon Musk agreed to buy the company for $44 billion earlier in the week.

FT wrote that Twitter found out about an error from the first quarter of 2019 which had overstated its users and had been unknown for around three years. The difference between the figures Twitter reported over the past year and the true count ranged between 1.4 million to 1.9 million, or just below 1% of the total.

Twitter has miscalculated numbers before, in 2017 discovering that another such error had been happening for three years.

This mistake was revealed just days after Musk leveraged his buyout.

Twitter’s first quarter earnings report offered little commentary on this, and also didn’t have much in the way of commentary for how the rest of the year will go.

Twitter’s monetizable active users, which is the site’s unique metric for counting its users, came in at 229 million, which was better than investors expected. The site has a year-on-year growth of 6.4% in the U.S. and 18.1% in the rest of the world.

See also: Musk-Twitter Deal ‘Great Win for Free Speech,’ Coinbase CEO Says

PYMNTS writes that Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong had good words on Musk’s buying of Twitter, saying it was a “victory for free speech” as several others had said. He said this could possibly be “more transformative” than people think, and could make Twitter protected from being “co-opted” again, if the company moves to a decentralized protocol over time.

Musk’s announcement set off several opinions, both positive and negative.

Musk said his goal is to make Twitter’s algorithms open source to increase user trust in what he said was the peoples’ “digital town square.”

Tesla saw its shares drop by 11% as of Tuesday (April 26) after the announcement, losing more than $100 billion in value.