The judge to decide whether or not to force Elon Musk to buy Twitter ordered, Thursday, August 25, the platform to provide a little more data to allow the entrepreneur to possibly substantiate his reproaches, but not the volume ” nonsense” he asked. Elon Musk indeed accuses Twitter of having lied about the extent of fake accounts and spam present on the social network, advancing this argument to justify his refusal to pay the 44 billion dollars that he had pledged to put on the table in the spring to redeem it.
He had therefore asked the magistrate, Kathaleen McCormick, to force Twitter to share much more information about its users, its calculation methods and its performance criteria. After hearing from both sides on Wednesday, the judge ruled in a decision released Thursday that it was “warranted,” in the run-up to a trial scheduled for October, to ask Twitter for “certain additional data.”
She ordered the social network to provide information on the 9,000 accounts used to audit fake accounts and spam in the fourth quarter of 2021, as well as the method used to select these accounts. Twitter having argued that this could violate data protection, the judge imposed that a limited number of people – lawyers and data analysts – have access to it.
The magistrate also ordered Twitter to provide a little more data on the indicator put forward by the group to reflect its performance, the number of so-called “monetizable” daily active users, to the detriment of other criteria a priori less favorable. The judge, however, did not grant all of Elon Musk’s requests, finding that they were “absurdly broad” and would involve “trillions and billions” of data.
In a separate ruling also released on Thursday, Judge McCormick ordered the billionaire to provide fake account and spam analysis conducted by her own experts based on an initial set of data provided by Twitter and put forward to substantiate. the refusal to buy the social network. However, it has not yet decided whether Twitter could have access to the documents used to make the analyzes, or to the experts themselves.