Twitter Says It Overstated Monthly-User Figures for 3 Years

From a different trending article:<p>&gt; 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.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;us-twitter-results&#x2F;twitter-says-it-could-turn-first-ever-profit-shares-surge-idUSKBN1CV1JP" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;us-twitter-results&#x2F;twitter-s...</a>

The amount of fraud in the statistics coming out of Silicon Valley companies is really shocking.<p>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.<p>Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0062458191&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0062458191&#x2F;</a>

&gt; <i>Twitter said its data-retention policies made it unable to reconcile the figures for periods before last year’s fourth quarter.</i><p>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&#x2F;FB where data is gold stored in Fort Knox.

Isn&#x27;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&#x27;t have material impact on the future. Also, as a client of Digits, I&#x27;m amused my app&#x27;s user activity made its way into TWTR&#x27;s prior quarterly results.

They knew. They 100% knew exactly what they were doing and didn&#x27;t want to correct it.

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.

Dishonesty in business should be fatal

It&#x27;s a bit sad that they&#x27;ve been propping up there numbers so heavily and still failing to generate capitol. Will this even impact there survivability?