Twitter must give Elon Musk more data on fake users, judge rules

A Delaware judge has ordered Twitter to hand over more data to Elon Musk relating to how it calculates bot and fake accounts on its platform but stopped short of fully granting the billionaire’s “absurdly broad” requests for information on the entire user base.

Ahead of the October 17th trial date in litigation over whether Mr Musk must go through with his $44 billion (€44.1 billion) takeover of the social media company, lawyers representing the billionaire entrepreneur have sought more data and documentation detailing Twitter’s calculation of how many users were legitimate and could be served advertising.

Mr Musk’s efforts to back out of his agreement to buy Twitter have centred on his allegation that the company understated the number of fake accounts on its platform. The transaction was first agreed in April before tech stocks collapsed, leaving Twitter’s market value at just under $32 billion.

Twitter lawyer Bradley Wilson said in a hearing on Wednesday that the social network had been upfront in its disclosures that less than 5 per cent of accounts were fake or spam. He emphasised that the company exercised “significant judgment” in calculating monetisable daily active users, or mDAUs, and said its “candid” disclosures gave it legal protection against claims it misled investors.

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Kathaleen McCormick, the judge overseeing the case, on Thursday ordered Twitter to produce information regarding 9,000 accounts it analysed for authenticity as part of an audit at the end of last year.

Twitter must also share some material relating to other internal discussions or analyses regarding crucial metrics about its user base beyond the mDAU metric, she ruled.

But the judge agreed with Twitter’s view that producing the entire range of data sought by Mr Musk, who is chief executive of Tesla, on its more than 200 million mDAU was overly burdensome.

“[Musk’s] documents request would require plaintiff to produce trillions upon trillions of data points,” she wrote. “[Twitter] has difficulty quantifying the burden of responding to that request because no one in their right mind has ever tried to undertake such an effort.”

A lawyer for Mr Musk, Alex Spiro, said his team looked “forward to reviewing the data Twitter has been hiding for many months”.

Twitter declined to comment. — Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2022