The surprise freeze on the takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk on Friday, May 13, was followed over the weekend by a spat between the billionaire and the social network’s legal team. The Tesla executive reportedly revealed the platform’s system for verifying the number of fake accounts, despite a non-disclosure agreement for this type of information.
A tweet from Elon Musk did not please the legal team
Elon Musk said he was suspending the acquisition of Twitter, causing its stock price to fall by 10%. While specifying that he remained attached to the operation, he said he wanted to take advantage of this break to check the number of fake accounts on the platform. The social network claims to have less than 5%, which the billionaire would doubt.
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He announced on May 14 that he will carry out checks with his ” team “, via ” a random sample of 100 Twitter followers “. He invited his nearly 95 million subscribers to do the same.
This is one of his next messages, where he explains his approach to a user, who posed a problem, ” I chose 100 as the number of sample sizes because that’s what Twitter uses to calculate <5% fake/spam/duplicate “.
The next day, Musk reported, obviously flabbergasted, receiving a phone call from Twitter’s legal department. to complain about violating their NDA [accord de non-divulgation] by revealing that the bot verification sample size is 100! “.
Twitter legal just called to complain that I violated their NDA by revealing the bot check sample size is 100!
This actually happened.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 14, 2022
With Twitter where are we?
Elon Musk had already complained about the number of fake accounts and especially bots on Twitter. A phenomenon against which all platforms seek to fight. Fake accounts hurt user experience, affect ad revenue and could also skew estimates of the number of paying Twitter users, a potential revenue stream for Elon Musk.
Nevertheless, a lot suspect a pretext from the billionaire. The latter might want to pull the price of the acquisition down, he would have trouble raising the necessary 44 billion dollars, or he would no longer want to afford his favorite social network.
At the moment, this is only speculation. In the meantime, as of May 15, Elon Musk this time attacked the Twitter algorithm, arguing that he was manipulating users. After an intervention by Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and reputed to be close to the boss of Tesla, he qualified his remarks… The exchange stopped there, until a next controversial tweet.