Arms pass between Twitter and Musk lawyers on the data to be provided

The lawyers for Elon Musk and Twitter reviewed on Wednesday the arguments they could use during the trial to force, or not, the businessman to buy the social network, citing, among other things, the recent revelations of a launcher alert. Elon Musk’s representative tried to convince the judge in charge of the case, Kathaleen McCormick, to force Twitter to share much more data about its users in order to verify that the social network was not lying about the false accounts present among its members. subscribers.

But the billionaire just wants him to fix them his way and, above all, he should have asked for them before agreeing to buy the company, retorted the platform’s lawyer, Bradley Wilson. The two sides were summoned to discuss the information to be shared ahead of the trial scheduled for October. Elon Musk’s team calls for broader access to the method and data Twitter uses to calculate the ratio of fake and spam accounts, which the platform estimates at less than 5%, to much more by the entrepreneur.

“Millions of billions of data”

But this request is not “relevant”, replied Twitter’s lawyer, because the platform always, in official documents, presented this figure as “an estimate”. And the last one was published in February, “before Elon Musk contacted Twitter about a possible acquisition.” Even if Twitter agreed to all of Elon Musk’s requests, it would represent “billions and billions of data,” Bradley Wilson said. And this could violate the rules of the platform, or even certain laws, regarding the protection of private data.

The platform could possibly share with Elon Musk, and not the general public, limited data related to 9,000 and a quarter accounts, he admitted. But Elon Musk’s team probably wants most of all to be able to “do their own count and see if they can come up with a different number.”

Elon Musk’s team is not the only one that wants clarification on the subject: according to a document made public on Wednesday, the US Market Regulatory Authority (SEC) also asked Twitter in mid-June to provide details on its method of identifying counterfeits. accounts and other spam. Elon Musk’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, has also accused the platform of publicly highlighting in its financial results the number of so-called “monetizable” daily active users instead of other criteria that show stagnant or even declining activity.

But Twitter has always indicated in its financial results that it takes into account other criteria to evaluate its performance, although the group does not necessarily detail them, the social network’s lawyer replied. “They have an economic incentive to deceive” investors, insisted Alex Spiro before mentioning the complaint of a whistleblower, the platform’s former head of security, sent to US authorities in early July and made public on Tuesday.

alert launcher

“As we say [Peiter] Zatko, management did not want to properly measure the prevalence of bots [comptes gérés par un logiciel et non un humain, ndlr] by groups of shareholders, by bonuses,” he said. His team asked that the whistleblower testify, but Twitter, which fired him in January, refused, arguing that this “was not relevant,” the lawyer lamented. On the other hand, he considered important listen to this former hacker also known as “Mudge”, summoned to a hearing on September 13.

The whistleblower’s allegations were also brought up during a Twitter management meeting with employees on Wednesday, with the company boss deploring the “wrong view” put forward by Peiter Zatko, according to US media. The judge did not say when he would make the decision for him.