Twitter Ordered by Judge to Give Elon Musk More Data on Spam Accounts

The Twitter-Elon Musk saga continues, with the Delaware judge overseeing the upcoming trial now ordering more bot data to be provided to the Tesla and SpaceX CEO.

Judge Kathaleen McCormick ordered Twitter on Thursday to hand over more bot account data to Musk, specifically, information related to the 9,000 accounts the social network analyzed in late 2021, reports The Financial Times. Twitter also needs to give Musk any materials related to internal discussions on user metrics, beyond the monetizable daily active users (mDAUs) metric.

McCormick did not follow through on the request by Musk’s team asking to get data from over 200 million mDAUs, citing it would be a burden on Twitter.

“[Musk’s] documents request would require Plaintiff to produce trillions upon trillions of data points,” said the judge. “[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.”

One of Musk’s lawyers, Alex Spiro, responded to the ruling by saying, they look “forward to reviewing the data Twitter has been hiding for many months”.

Musk is arguing Twitter has not been forthright in its bot data, believing the actual number is higher than what Twitter has cited at less than 5%. Musk believes the actual number is double at 10%, and was ordered by McCormick in a separate ruling to hand over the methodology behind that specific claim to Twitter.

Earlier this week, Twitter’s former security head revealed he made a whistleblower complaint to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission, and members of Congress. Twitter misled and covered up spam accounts and security flaws, claimed Peiter Zatko.

Twitter and Musk will being their trial on October 17, where it will be decided if the Tesla CEO can back out of the deal, as he believes Twitter is not being honest about bot and spam data.