Twitter Says It Overcounted Its Users Over The Past 3 Years

According to Twitter’s Q1 2022 earnings out this morning, the company admits it had been overcounting the number of users on its service for at least three years due to a technical error involving linked accounts.

In its earnings release, Twitter explains that it launched an account linking feature in March 2019 that allowed users with more than one Twitter account to link them together in its user interface, allowing them to more easily switch between their different identities. Those multiple accounts belonged to a single person, clearly, but continued to be counted as separate mDAUs — or “monetizable daily active users.”