The State Judge Delaware has instructed Twitter to give Ilon Mask more information about how she calculates bots and fake accounts on the platform, but has not responded to the billionaire's request for information about the entire Twitter user base.
In the run-up to the 17 October trial on whether Mask was obliged to purchase a social platform for $44 billion, the business billionaire's lawyers asked for more information on how Twitter was determining the number of fake and real users, since only the latter were of interest to advertisers.
Mask's attempts to get out of the Twitter purchase agreement were based on his claim that the company had underestimated the data on fake accounts on the platform. The deal was first announced in April, before the company's shares went down, resulting in a market value of just under $32 billion.
Twitter lawyer Bradley Wilson said on Wednesday that the social network was honest in its statements that less than 5% of the accounts were fake, he stressed that the company used reliable data to calculate the monetization of daily active users, and said that such disclosure provided Twitter with legal protection against claims that he misled investors.
On Thursday, Caitlin McCormick, the judge in charge of the case, ordered Twitter to provide information on 9,000 accounts that had been analysed for authenticity as part of the audit at the end of last year, and decided that Twitter should have provided material related to internal information related to critical user indicators, while the judge agreed with Twitter that providing the full range of Mask ' s requested data on over 200 million users was overly burdensome.
" she wrote. "
Maska's lawyer, Alex Spiro, said that "Tweet refused to comment.
These data can help Mask in his attempts to prove that Twitter was hiding the true number of fake accounts on its social network. He claims that Twitter's creation of inaccurate user reporting was a cloaking operation designed to impress Wall Street to cover up the growth of new users and spam on the social media.
Earlier this week, Peyter Zatko, a former head of Twitter security, filed a separate complaint in which he made similar statements about the number of active users, revealing information to American regulators and members of Congress. Zatko was dismissed from the company in January and will be required to testify before the Senate Judicial Committee on 13 September.
Earlier this month, Ilon Mask provided his own analysis of Twitter audiences, in which he claimed that at least 10 per cent of them were fairy or bots, whereas the company estimated them to be "less than 5 per cent." In a separate ruling on Thursday, the judge ordered Mask to provide Twitter with the evidence on which the allegation was based.
According to the documents published on Wednesday, the unique Twitter users were also under the scrutiny of the US Securities and Exchange Commission. In June, the market regulator sent a letter to Twitter asking for more clarity and asking for an explanation as to why the figure was wrongly overstated in 2019.
Court proceedings continue to hinder the day-to-day work of Twitter. On Wednesday, at a meeting of all employees, at which Director-General Parag Agraval described Zatko's allegations as "untrustworthy", the heads of the units reported that the number of resignations from the company had increased to 18.1 per cent.