As per a report in The Verge, for three years in a row, Twitter miscalculated the number of daily users on the platform, overcounting by up to 1.9 million users every quarter from Quarter 1 2019 to Quarter 4 2021.
This isn’t the first time Twitter has acted in this manner. In 2017 also, Twitter revealed that over the preceding three years, it miscalculated its user counts by 1 million to 2 million users. The reoccurring mistake was revealed in Twitter’s financial statement for the first quarter of 2022.
This time, the problem was caused by Twitter incorrectly counting many accounts as active when they were all linked to a single user, even though they weren’t all active at the same time.
Twitter now has around 229 million daily users, a rise of more than 10 million over the previous quarter’s exaggerated figure. Twitter reported a $128 million operating loss on revenue of $1.2 billion.
Elon Musk, who is already the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, is now the owner of the social media behemoth Twitter. Twitter’s board has done all it could to thwart Elon Musk’s acquisition proposal, including attempting to use the poison pill method. However, Musk’s offer, along with the mood of the majority of Twitter shareholders, finally compelled the Twitter board to act.
Musk had stated that he had lost trust in Twitter’s existing management and that the company could not reach its full potential under them. He intended to take the firm private so that he could have complete control over it and steer Twitter to its greatest potential.
Elon Musk has stated repeatedly that freedom of expression is extremely important to him, and that it is one of the primary reasons for his purchase of Twitter. Musk, who frequently tweets jokes and memes, has expressed dissatisfaction with Twitter’s control over its users and has never veiled his desire to protect free expression.
Twitter Inc. has locked changes to its source code following the takeover to prevent agitated staff from making unauthorised changes.
