- Twitter overcounted its users over the past three years due to an error involving linked accounts.
- The company overstated its number of daily users by 1.4 million to 1.9 million per quarter.
- In 2017, Twitter revealed it overcounted its daily users in the three previous years.
Twitter overcounted its users over the past three years due to a technical error involving linked accounts, it revealed in its earnings release for the first quarter of 2022.
The miscount came after Twitter launched a feature in 2019 allowing users to link multiple accounts together to more easily switch between accounts, the company said.
However, "an error was made at that time" where these linked accounts were counted as separate "monetizable daily active users" even though they belonged to a single person, the earnings report said.
According to its findings, the company overstated its daily users by 1.4 million to 1.9 million per quarter.
After adjustments, Twitter said it has 229 million daily users, which is still up by 15.9% from the same time last year.
But as The Verge writer Jacob Kastrenakes noted, the error is "one final embarrassing slip-up for Twitter as the company wrangles a deal to be taken private, at which point it will no longer have to share these figures publicly." On Monday, Twitter accepted a buyout offer from billionaire Elon Musk for $44 billion in a deal expected to close this year.
This is not the first time the social media platform has incorrectly tallied its users. In 2017, it admitted that it had been overstating its user figures by about one to two million for three years, per TechCrunch.