Twitter in the hot seat for ‘honest mistake’
Social media firms criticized for lack of checks, balances
Data-driven SAN FRANCIS CO Internet companies that boast they can precisely target advertising down to users’ laundry detergent and their favorite TV shows are getting a reputation for overstating their reach.
On Thursday, Twitter admitted it had miscounted its monthly user numbers for three years, raising tough questions for social media companies about how accurate this data is.
The revelation came as Twitter, Facebook and Google face intensifying scrutiny over hundreds of fake accounts from Russia that purchased political advertising to influence the outcome of the U.S. presidential election.
As they prepare to be hauled before Senate and House intelligence committees next week to testify on how Russia may have advertised on their services to sway public sentiment, these colossal information portals are being cast as the Wild West of the Internet, with too few checks and balances on their growing power over people’s time and advertisers’ pocketbooks.
“I believe it’s an honest mistake, but it doesn’t look good because it’s an overstatement, and when they have mistakes it’s always overstating and not understating,” Dennis Yu, chief technology officer of BlitzMetrics, said of Twitter’s error.
The challenge: It’s not as simple as you might imagine to figure out how many people use a social media service. Counting errors can occur as they did with Twitter. Social media companies also
include all kinds of users, from businesses to publishers.
Duplicate accounts — when a person has more than one Facebook or Twitter account, say one for themselves, one for their business, one for their child and another for their pet — can also inflate numbers. And then there are the fake accounts and accounts run by bots, not humans, that companies are continually trying to root out and remove.
That’s why third-party measurements often conflict with measurements provided by the companies, says eMarketer analyst Debra Aho Williamson.
For example, eMarketer factored out bots, duplicate accounts and spam accounts to estimate Facebook had 1.37 billion monthly active users in 2016. Facebook calculated it had 1.86 billion monthly users at the end of 2016.
“Duplicate” accounts (an account that a user maintains in addition to his or her main account) represented 6% of monthly active users, and fake accounts represented 1% of its user base in 2016, according to Facebook.
“Digital media measurement has never been as exact a science as you would think,” Williamson said. “People used to call the Internet ‘the most measurable medium,’ but there have been many instances over the years where things like user counts have been under- or overstated.”
Twitter, which has struggled to add users amid withering competition from Google, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat, restated its users for the past three quarters, revising them down by one million to two million. It said it miscalculated because it included third party applications that should not have been counted.
“It’s important to note that since it’s a small absolute number on a base of over 300 million (monthly active users), that historical growth rates and absolute numbers really don’t change very much,” Twitter’s chief financial officer Ned Segal said during a conference call with analysts.
Investors shrugged at the disclosure. But this isn’t the first time Twitter has had a problem with how it’s measuring its audience. In 2016, it briefly miscalculated metrics on video ad campaigns, which it blamed on a technical error.
Twitter’s also continually try- ing to weed out fake or spambot accounts. As much as 15% of Twitter’s user base may be bots, according to research from the University of Southern California and Indiana University.
Twitter is far from the only company facing criticism over measurement errors. In September Facebook was accused of overestimating its reach with young people. That’s when Pivotal Research analyst Brian Wieser noted that Facebook claimed to advertisers it could reach 25 million more young Americans than the U.S. census reports exist.