Couldn't Twitter track how many times you "request" your feed? Although not perfect, I'm sure they could get an approximation of those users who are just "lurking". They could also track logins from the web side, and probably app usage.
This data wouldn't show on outside measurements (like in the article) but would help Twitter know who is active and not.
Twitter definitely could, and they can easily get a clear idea of how many of these 'zero tweet' accounts actually are active. However, Twitter have no reason to give this information out and there are not many ways for outsiders to discover this information.
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Couldn't Twitter track how many times you "request" your feed? Although not perfect, I'm sure they could get an approximation of those users who are just "lurking". They could also track logins from the web side, and probably app usage.
This data wouldn't show on outside measurements (like in the article) but would help Twitter know who is active and not.
Twitter definitely could, and they can easily get a clear idea of how many of these 'zero tweet' accounts actually are active. However, Twitter have no reason to give this information out and there are not many ways for outsiders to discover this information.
There would be many business reasons to not release such information.