Twitter vs Musk: Judge tells Twitter hand over more data on spam accounts
Firm must provide more details about how it evaluates the number of fake accounts, but Judge Kathaleen McCormick stops short of granting Musk's team significant access to Twitter's data
The Delaware judge organising the October 17th trial in which Twitter is seeking to force Elon Musk to proceed with his agreed $44 billion takeover of the company, has demanded the social media company hand over more data about the prevalence of fake accounts and bots on its platform. However, she declined to grand Musk's team access to a much broader set of data points from the company.
On Thursday, Judge Kathaleen McCormick gave Twitter two weeks to produce information regarding 9,000 accounts it analysed for bots as part of an audit in 2021, an audit that Musk claims influenced his valuation of the company.
Twitter uses a metric called 'monetisable daily active users' (mDAUs) as an estimation of the number of genuine accounts. It claims that less than 5% of accounts are fake, while Musk asserts the real number is 30% or more. He used this argument as a way of backing out of the deal, which he had already signed, saying that Twitter had misled regulators and investors in order to boost its share price.
"We look forward to reviewing the data Twitter has been hiding for many months," said Alex Spiro, Musk's attorney.
Musk's claims that Twitter is underreporting spam accounts will have been bolstered this week by former security chief Peiter ‘Mudge' Zatko's assertion that Twitter's leadership lacked the motivation and resources to properly understand the scope of the bot issue on the platform.
Musk's legal team has served subpoenas on Zatko and former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey in advance of the trial.
In addition to data on the 9,000 accounts used in the audit, McCormick ordered Twitter to hand over internal documentation regarding discussions over other metrics and analyses used to evaluate its user base, such as 'User Active Minutes'.
However, she stopped short of granting Musk's lawyers their demand to be able to evaluate 200 million Twitter users for authenticity.
"Defendants' [Musk's] data requests are absurdly broad. Read literally, defendants' documents request would require plaintiff to produce trillions upon trillions of data points," she said.
Twitter wants McCormick to order Musk to complete the acquisition at the agreed price of $54.20 per share. After the agreement was signed, tech stocks, including Twitter, dropped, and many analysts voiced the suspicion that Musk was trying to back out of the deal which now overvalued Twitter, while also seeking to avoid a $1billion penalty for reneging.
Twitter' shares rose slightly after the ruling, up 0.6% to $41.05.