As a third party? Probably not. Which is why it's going to be very hard to disprove Twitter's assertion unless Twitter chooses to share their data.
That's part of why I find articles like this frustrating: I don't think they have the data to actually answer they question they're attempting to answer. Knowing that, what's the purpose of the article?
> Which is why it's going to be very hard to disprove Twitter's assertion unless Twitter chooses to share their data.
It's impossible to disprove Twitter's assertion because they never claimed that less than 5% of their accounts are spam. From their quarterly earnings:
>We define monetizable daily active usage or users (mDAU) as Twitter users who logged in or were otherwise authenticated and accessed Twitter on any given day through Twitter.com or Twitter applications that are able to show ads.
>... mDAU does not include users accessing Twitter through third-party applications.
Their statement said that less than 5% of their monetizeable daily active users are spam. There very well could be 50% of the entire user base as bots or spam, but that doesn't negate the metric Twitter releases.
This doesn’t resolve the issue the article has though. I’m a mDAU because I’ve logged in, yet there is no way for the people writing the article to know that I’m active.
That's part of why I find articles like this frustrating: I don't think they have the data to actually answer they question they're attempting to answer. Knowing that, what's the purpose of the article?