Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

Is Facebook Beating Twitter? Ask the Bots

The social networks need a credible mechanism to verify user numbers.

July 28, 2017 at 5:43 PM UTC

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

Bot or not?
Photographer: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

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Judging from reported growth in user numbers, one could conclude that Facebook is beating Twitter in the battle of social networks. Problem is, it's hard to know how real all those users are.

Twitter reported this week that it had 328 million monthly active users at the end of June, the same as at the end of March. Facebook reported 2.01 billion monthly active users, up from 1.94 billion in March. Another measure that the companies now like to stress -- the average number of users per day -- also showed Facebook ahead. Twitter said its daily active users were up 12 percent in the second quarter from a year earlier, without naming an absolute number (Re/Code calculates it's some 157 million). Facebook said it was up 17 percent to 1.32 billion.