Has Twitter really hit 500 million users, as a new study claims -- or is the company drowning in fake accounts?
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Twitter tends to be very careful when it comes to announcing user numbers. Wary of its problem with bots and spam accounts -- such as the thousands that have started following Mitt Romney in the past few weeks -- the company appears to have a policy of only discussing the number of active users.
Back in September 2011, in a State of the Union-style talk at Twitter headquarters, CEO Dick Costolo said there were 100 million active users who log in at least once a month, while 50 million log in every day. On the company's sixth birthday back in March, it announced the number of active users had reached 140 million -- though it didn't specify whether or not that was monthly logins.
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Now a Paris-based data analysis company, Semiocast, claims Twitter reached the half-billion accounts mark in June 2012, including more than 140 million in the U.S. alone.
Semiocast doesn't discuss the difference between active and inactive users. Do the math, however, and it may have just inadvertently revealed that the company has 360 million accounts whose users -- if you can call them that -- either don't log in every month, or don't exist in the first place.
If that's the case, fake users on Twitter may outnumber the real thing by more than 2 to 1.
The problem is, as data analysis firms such as Topsy have told us in the past, we can't really get a definitive answer on this. Even the world's smartest computer scientists can't discern the difference between someone trying Twitter a few times and then dropping it, and accounts established by spammers or others with malicious intent.
Semiocast is able to provide some more definitive data when it looks at the locations added to tweets. What city in the world tends to tweet the most? You may be surprised to learn it's the capital of Indonesia, Jakarta:
We've reached out to Twitter and Semiocast for further comment. In the meantime, let us know what you think. Where does the true number of Twitter users actually lie?
This story originally published on Mashable here.
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