- Twitter says Elon Musk was presented weeks ago with his own analysis on “bots” or fake accounts.
- The data companies he chose found bots to be between 5% and 11%, Twitter’s legal team said.
- Musk has claimed in the past that at least 20% of Twitter accounts are bots.
Elon Musk’s own data scientists failed to find many “bots” on Twitter, and certainly far below the billionaire’s public estimates, according to lawyers for the social media company.
The day before Musk sent his first letter to Twitter executives ending his deal to acquire the company for $44 billion, two companies he hired to analyze massive user data from Twitter have released their own Twitter bot ratings. The firm Cyabra told Musk that it estimated Twitter had maybe 11% bots or fake accounts. Fellow firm CounterAction said its analysis found 5.3% bots, Twitter lawyers told a hearing on Tuesday.
This is very different from Musk’s estimates. He said in May on Twitter that fake accounts or spam on the platform could be “much” greater than 20%. In his termination letter, Musk said he was backing out of the deal because bots on the platform were “significantly higher” than Twitter’s 5% estimate. publicly disclosed. Twitter has filed a lawsuit to force it to complete the acquisition, and the case will go to court in Delaware in October.
Both findings from the companies chosen by Musk are “fully consistent with Twitter’s assertions,” an attorney for the company said. “None of these analyzes remotely confirmed what Mr. Musk said to the Twitter parties and told the world in the termination letter he served on July 8.”
Twitter’s attorney then accused Musk’s legal team of intentionally withholding data during the court battle, saying they weren’t able to view the documents until Tuesday, despite having been looking for them since the first days. trial days.
“If there is any analysis that actually backs up what Mr. Musk said to Twitter and to the world, it certainly wasn’t produced as a discovery in this case,” the attorney added during the hearing.
This can be a risky argument because 11% bots is still significantly higher than Twitter’s own estimates. Musk’s legal team declined to comment.
Musk’s main argument for scrapping the deal centered on his claims that Twitter intentionally misled him, investors and the public about the number of genuine accounts on its platform, or those operated by a single human user. Musk claims this amounts to fraud and allows him to opt out of the acquisition at no cost. Earlier this month, the billionaire amended his countersuit against Twitter to include new allegations based on the whistleblower’s disclosure of a former security chief at the social media company, Pieter “Mudge. ” Zatko.
Among the new allegations, Twitter failed to comply with a 2011 consent decree with the FTC regarding the security of its data and that it does not hold the appropriate intellectual property licenses for certain important machine learning work. Musk now says those issues also allow him to opt out of the deal altogether. Legal experts aren’t convinced any of Musk’s claims are strong enough to win this case.
Twitter said it investigated and addressed all of Zatko’s claims when it raised them during his year with the company, and it is now looking for any links between Zatko and Musk or his advisers.
While speculation continues that an out-of-court settlement could take place between the two sides, the case is still scheduled for a five-day trial from October 17.
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Contact Grace Kay at [email protected].