SEC Investigates Twitter Over Spam Accounts – Court Orders Social Media Giant To Provide Additional Data To Elon Musk – Featured Bitcoin News

Twitter Inc. has been ordered to provide additional data related to spam and bot accounts to Elon Musk. The social media giant has sued the Tesla CEO for ending his $44 billion offer to buy the social media platform. The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has also asked Twitter about the number of spam accounts.

Court orders Twitter to provide additional data to Elon Musk

Chancellor Kathaleen St. J. McCormick, a Delaware Court of Chancery judge, on Thursday signed an order requiring Twitter Inc. (NYSE: TWTR ) to provide additional data to Tesla and Spacex CEO Elon Musk. Plaintiff Twitter has sued Musk and his two companies, X Holdings I and X Holdings II, for scuttling the $44 billion deal to buy the social media platform. Musk has opposed Twitter.

Judge McCormick stated in his order:

The defendant’s data requests are absolutely abroad.

She added: “Read literally, the defendant’s document request would require the plaintiff to produce trillions upon trillions of data points reflecting all the data Twitter can store for each of the approximately 200 million accounts included in the mDAU count every day every three years.”

The social media company defines monetized daily active users (mDAU) as “Twitter users who logged in and accessed Twitter on a given day through Twitter.com or Twitter applications capable of serving ads.”

The order further reads:

Plaintiff is ordered to produce a subset of what Defendant has requested: the 9,000 accounts reviewed in connection with Plaintiff’s audit for the fourth quarter of 2021, which the parties refer to as the “historical snapshot.”

Plaintiff represented that with significant effort these documents could be produced in less than two weeks, and Plaintiff shall strive to meet this timeline. In addition, the plaintiff must provide documents sufficient to show how these 9,000 accounts were selected for review,” the order details.

Meanwhile, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is investigating Twitter over its method of identifying spam accounts, according to a new regulatory filing made public on Wednesday.

In a letter dated June 15, the SEC asked Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal to provide some information about how the company calculates the number of bot accounts. “We note your estimate that the average number of fake or spam accounts during fiscal year 2021 continues to represent fewer than 5% of mDAU,” the SEC wrote, adding:

To the extent material, please state the methodology used in the calculation of these figures and the underlying judgments and assumptions used by management.

Twitter responded to the SEC request with a standard description of its methodology on June 22. The social media giant informed the securities regulator that it has “adequately” disclosed the methodology it uses, noting that it randomly selects thousands of accounts for human review each quarter.

The SEC sent another letter to Twitter on July 27 saying, “We have completed our review of your filings. We remind you that the Company and its management are responsible for the accuracy and adequacy of their disclosures, notwithstanding any review, comment, action or lack of action by staff.”

Earlier this month, Musk sold nearly 8 million Tesla shares. The Tesla CEO said that in case Twitter forces the buyout deal to end and some equity partners don’t come through, it’s important to avoid an emergency sale of Tesla stock.

Do you think the court will force Elon Musk to go through with the deal to buy Twitter? Let us know in the comments section below.

Kevin Helms

A student of Austrian economics, Kevin found Bitcoin in 2011 and has been an evangelist ever since. His interests lie in Bitcoin security, open source systems, network effects and the intersection of economics and cryptography.