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I looked at the actual data and concluded this is a non-story. Twitter overstated users by <1% each quarter the past 2 years. That is not an egregious accounting error. This happened because they double counted users who used linked accounts.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/twitter-announces-first-quart...

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The headline is also misleading, implying that Twitter deliberately revealed this information in advance of the Musk purchase when in fact this was just part of their normal quarterly reporting.

The comments on this link unfortunately show that many people still only just read the headline before jumping in with their 2c.

Did they report this error last quarter also? If not.... then what?

To my knowledge they're revealing this for the first time in this quarterly report.

As for "then what", there's always the possibility of a shareholder lawsuit or Musk using this as a pretext to back out of his offer. That said, the OP indicated the impact on MAU is pretty small (I didn't check this myself), so in the end it's probably all sound and fury signifying nothing.

Thanks for being one of the few readers that does a bit of fact checking on news - keeping the old HN alive.

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