Twitter admitted on Thursday to vastly inflating the number of monthly users the company has received over the past three years.
The Wall Street Journal reports that a Twitter spokeswoman reportedly admitted that the company had been including users of a service for third-party apps as monthly users when they should not have been counted. The company revised their recent user count for the past three quarters by 1 million to 2 million but stated that they do not possess user data further back than that.
In their third quarter, Twitter added approximately 4 million monthly users, surpassing analyst expectations by approximately one million. Twitter’s current user base sits at approximately 330 million. Based on recent information, however, Twitter’s user base actually shrank in the second quarter by one million users for the first time since 2015. Twitter previously believed that their user base had stayed flat during the second quarter.
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