> no-one has ever shown that twitter were lying about bot numbers, and the only way you can pretend they were is if you pretend they were claiming their mDAU number was their user account number
This is entirely false. Read the whistleblower report:
“The company could not even provide an accurate upper bound on the total number of spam bots on the platform. The site integrity team gave three reasons for this failure: (1) they did not know how to measure; (2) they were buried under constant firefighting and could not keep up with reacting to bots and other platform abuse; and, most troubling, (3) senior management had no appetite to properly measure the prevalence of bot accounts—because as Mudge later learned from a different sensitive source, they were concerned that if accurate measurements ever became public, it would harm the image and valuation of the company.”
This is entirely false. Read the whistleblower report:
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/22186683-twitter-whi...
“The company could not even provide an accurate upper bound on the total number of spam bots on the platform. The site integrity team gave three reasons for this failure: (1) they did not know how to measure; (2) they were buried under constant firefighting and could not keep up with reacting to bots and other platform abuse; and, most troubling, (3) senior management had no appetite to properly measure the prevalence of bot accounts—because as Mudge later learned from a different sensitive source, they were concerned that if accurate measurements ever became public, it would harm the image and valuation of the company.”