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1. Chris Trottier (atomicpoet@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 12-Feb-2023 04:50:34 JST Chris Trottier

   Other people have seen this, but I'm adding more alt text.

   Taylor Lorenz demonstrates that no one can trust Twitter's metrics.

   She posted from a private account with no followers. Nevertheless, she got "views".

   Twitter isn't the only social media company that fakes views. Meta does the same with videos.

   The truth is that view counts exist not to give you truthful data, but to incentivize your continued posting.

   Don't be fooled by these so-called "view counts"!

   • 🌲Number 1 Pleroma Criminal on XBL 🇵🇱|🇺🇸 (phenomx6@fedi.pawlicker.com)'s status on Sunday, 12-Feb-2023 04:50:29 JST 🌲Number 1 Pleroma Criminal on XBL 🇵🇱|🇺🇸

     in reply to

     • Moon
     • Taylor Lorenz
     • Darnell Clayton :verified:
     Or crawlers from other sites being counted as real.
     
     After Ellen Pao was ousted from Reddit, a few years later she basically said the quiet part out loud; they're fake numbers.
     https://twitter.com/ekp/status/1078095527420383233
     
     Namely, anyone who is a logged out cell phone user is counted as a different user when towers are switched. If an unlogged in user is on multiple devices, it's multiple users. The context behind her statement had to do with a FB lawsuit alleging fake numbers too:
     https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/how-much-of-the-internet-is-fake.html
   • Moon (moon@shitposter.club)'s status on Sunday, 12-Feb-2023 04:50:30 JST Moon

     in reply to

     • Taylor Lorenz
     • Darnell Clayton :verified:
     • Neal Rauhauser
     @darnell @nealr @atomicpoet @taylorlorenz It's not ideal but I suspect that the numbers are roughly accurate after a while. So on Youtube part of the issue is it's a massive distributed system and it takes time for every part of YouTube to get in sync with roughly the same numbers. Twitter is almost certainly the same, it takes a while for every part of the system to collate views and total them up to show to you. The stray counts probably really are internal systems not being properly accounted for but I bet that once you start doing real numbers, the false ones are a negligible percent. So like, if you have 10,000 impressions, maybe 10-20 of them are internal systems, but that is a complete guess on my part, I have no way of knowing, nobody does but Twitter. So that's the ideal scenario, close numbers but not perfectly accurate. I don't know Twitter's internals so I can't say for sure.
     
     It's totally possible that internal systems could be dinging your counts tons and tons and really making the numbers really wrong. I'm betting that's not happening but Twitter's kind of in chaos now so it could be happening lol. But I don't believe, not even for a second , that they're faking numbers to fool people, though.
     
     I've seen this happen before though, but it was on a dating website lol, where they're trying to trick you into paying so they faked profile views. Different situation from twitter though.
   • Darnell Clayton :verified: (darnell@one.darnell.one)'s status on Sunday, 12-Feb-2023 04:50:31 JST Darnell Clayton :verified:

     in reply to

     • Moon
     • Taylor Lorenz
     • Neal Rauhauser

     @Moon @nealr @atomicpoet @taylorlorenz So to sum it up, this is how we should treat #Twitter stats anytime we see our metrics‽

     https://youtu.be/H6yQOs93Cgg

     What can I say, I love #StarTrek! 😂🤣😂

     Once advertisers realize the ad stats are fake, I would expect lawsuits against #ElonMusk to increase.

   • Neal Rauhauser (nealr@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 12-Feb-2023 04:50:32 JST Neal Rauhauser

     in reply to

     • Taylor Lorenz
     • Darnell Clayton :verified:

     @darnell @atomicpoet @taylorlorenz

     Another explanation - Twitter metrics are partly based on internal systems doing things. I have a locked account with no followers. Roughly half of that activity is me refreshing, the rest has to be from the system side. It went up two more views between the time I closed that tab and looking again to respond to your toot.

   • Neal Rauhauser (nealr@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 12-Feb-2023 04:50:32 JST Neal Rauhauser

     in reply to

     • Taylor Lorenz
     • Darnell Clayton :verified:

     @darnell @atomicpoet @taylorlorenz

     Not only did I get two new views while away, that Impressions count went from 5 to 10. That's got to be some sort of dance between two or more batch processes that are calculating results. If it's done the same way for each tweet, it's a little inaccurate but not biased, since happening to everyone.

   • Moon (moon@shitposter.club)'s status on Sunday, 12-Feb-2023 04:50:32 JST Moon

     in reply to

     • Taylor Lorenz
     • Darnell Clayton :verified:
     • Neal Rauhauser
     @nealr @darnell @atomicpoet @taylorlorenz people have observed this on youtube view counts for _years_
   • Darnell Clayton :verified: (darnell@one.darnell.one)'s status on Sunday, 12-Feb-2023 04:50:33 JST Darnell Clayton :verified:

     in reply to

     • Taylor Lorenz

     @atomicpoet There are 3 possibilities about @taylorlorenz experiment using a private #Twitter account with no followers.

     ☝🏾 As stated earlier, Twitter metrics are fake

     ✌🏾 Twitter metrics are broken & there is no one around to fix them (which means advertisers are getting screwed over)

     🤟🏾 Metrics are accurate but they are recording Twitter employees views (they can access private accounts).

     All of these scenarios are alarming, especially the last one.

   • Moon (moon@shitposter.club)'s status on Sunday, 12-Feb-2023 04:55:03 JST Moon

     in reply to

     • 🌲Number 1 Pleroma Criminal on XBL 🇵🇱|🇺🇸
     • Taylor Lorenz
     • Darnell Clayton :verified:
     @PhenomX6 @atomicpoet @taylorlorenz @darnell This is a broader issue of "what's a unique user view" that affects the entire Internet, it's true but a different problem. The problem OP is concerned about is that the actual dings seem wrong. The purpose of my post is to say that there are innocuous reasons why exact counts will never happen.
     🌲Number 1 Pleroma Criminal on XBL 🇵🇱|🇺🇸 likes this.