An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source): Twitter said on Thursday that it had overstated its monthly-user figures since 2014 after mistakenly including data from third-party applications in its counting. The revelation came as the company reported that its net loss had narrowed in the third quarter and that its number of daily active users had risen 14 percent. The company said it had discovered that its measure of monthly active users had been improperly including figures from third-party applications that used Digits, a software-development program. Digits is part of the Fabric mobile application platform that Twitter sold to Alphabet, Google’s parent company, this year. Digits allowed third-party applications to send authentication messages through Twitter’s systems and did not reflect activity on the Twitter platform, the company said. As a result, the company lowered the number of monthly active users by two million for the first and second quarters of this year and by one million for the fourth quarter of 2016. Twitter said its data-retention policies made it unable to reconcile the figures for periods before last year’s fourth quarter.

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Source: Slashdot – Twitter Says It Overstated Monthly-User Figures For 3 Years