Newsday (Long Island newspaper) did this, when they were found out it killed them. Afterwards, the paper was half the size, they couldn't get advertisers..

https://www.warc.com/newsandopinion/news/ny-based-newsday%E2...

On the other hand, for twitter's main use case, do twitter user counts even matter? It's mostly just a direct channel for famous people to the mainstream media.