- 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.
- However, the judge agreed with Twitter’s view that producing the entire range of data sought by Musk on its more than 200mn mDAU was overly burdensome.
In the latest installment of the ongoing Twitter-vs-Musk saga, Musk’s team has claimed in a legal filing that 10% of the social network’s daily active users who see ads were fake accounts or bots, compared with the company’s estimate of “less than 5%”.
In a separate ruling on Thursday, the judge ordered Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO, to make the methodology behind that claim available to the social media company.
Furthermore, a Delaware judge has ordered Twitter (-1.70%) to hand over more data to Elon Musk relating to how it calculates bot and fake accounts on its platform.
But the judge stopped short of fully granting the billionaire’s “absurdly broad” requests for information on the entire user base.
Twitter has also been requested to share some material relating to other internal discussions or analyses regarding crucial metrics about its user base beyond the monetisable daily active users (mDAU) metric.
However, the judge agreed with Twitter’s view that producing the entire range of data sought by Musk on its more than 200mn mDAU was overly burdensome.
According to filings released on Wednesday, the mDAU figure had also come under scrutiny from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission as regulators are seeking more clarity on how Twitter’s mDAU metric had been incorrectly overinflated in 2019.
Last month, Twitter sued its largest shareholder for trying to back out of its US$44 billion buyout deal, telling the court that Musk is wrongfully breaking their agreement by doing so.
