this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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When you login initially it offers to follow all your Instagram follows. Even if they've never logged in. Its creating shadow accounts for all of them.
When they login initially they find they already have a bunch of followers.
So it's not all of Instagram. It's just all the people who've tried it + all the people they tried to follow.
I'd love a citation for that.
If it only took a single one of your followers signing up for Threads to make a "shadow account" for you, I'd imagine the number of accounts would basically be the same as the number of Instagram accounts.
That really doesn't need to be known, we could tell just from average daily active user counts. If those weren't provided, that's a big red flag on the rest of their numbers because there's no reason not to include those numbers. Active users is the most accurate measure. They might reasonably choose to hype the signups number, but if everyone wants to know actives and it's not provided, that's Meta choosing to hide the information. Not a confident move.
It's simply a database. Your account is in the database and the threads account is an attribute of it marked as "activated" or "not activated". After that it's just a matter of counting the activated accounts.
Sure, but they're not reporting the number of Instagram accounts. They're reporting the number of, to borrow your term, 'activated' Threads accounts, which only happens when the user makes active and intentional steps to download the Threads app and sign into it.
I don't think it's that wild to call that "signing up for Threads" and reporting it as such.
So you're saying they are going out of their way to commit fraud on a scale that would trigger an SEC investigation of a publicly traded company, rather than you just making up the way something works? You do understand how you can have such placeholders not be included in the number of active users...right?