First pass of arms between the lawyers of Twitter and Elon Musk
Both sides presented their first arguments to Judge Kathaleen McCormick on Wednesday during a preliminary hearing.
Elon Musk’s team is asking for broader access to the method and data used by Twitter to calculate the proportion of fake accounts and spam. (illustrative image)
AFP
Lawyers for Elon Musk and Twitter gave Wednesday, during a preliminary hearing, an overview of the arguments they could put forward during the trial to force, or not, the entrepreneur to buy the social network.
Elon Musk’s lawyer tried to convince the judge in charge of the case, Kathaleen McCormick, to force Twitter to share much more data on its users in order to verify that the social network was not lying about the fake accounts present among its subscribers.
But the billionaire only wants them to arrange them in his own way and above all, should have asked for them before agreeing to buy the company, retorted the platform’s lawyer, Bradley Wilson. The two parties were convened to discuss the information to be shared before the trial scheduled for October.
Request not “relevant”
Elon Musk’s team asks for broader access to the method and data used by Twitter to calculate the proportion of fake accounts and spam, estimated at less than 5% by the platform, to much more by the entrepreneur .
But this request is not “relevant”, replied Twitter’s lawyer, because the platform has always, in official documents, presented this figure as “an estimate”. And the latest was published in February, “before Elon Musk contacted Twitter about a potential acquisition.”
Even if Twitter acceded to all of Elon Musk’s requests, it would represent “billions and billions of data,” said Bradley Wilson. And this could violate the rules of the platform, or even certain laws, concerning the protection of private data.
The platform could possibly share limited data covering 9,000 accounts and a quarter, he conceded. But Elon Musk’s team probably mostly wants to be able to “do their own count and see if they can come up with a different number.”
“Economic incentive to deceive”
Elon Musk’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, also accused the platform of publicly highlighting in its financial results the number of so-called “monetizable” daily active users rather than other criteria showing stagnation, or even a decline, of its activity. “They have an economic incentive to deceive” investors, he said before mentioning the complaint of a whistleblower, former chief of security of the platform, sent to the American authorities at the beginning of July and made public Tuesday .
In this document, Peiter Zatko affirms that the company favors the growth of its number of users to the fight against spam and bots (accounts managed by software and not a human). But Twitter has always indicated in its financial results that it takes into account other criteria to evaluate its performance, even if the group does not necessarily detail them, retorted its lawyer. The judge did not say when she would make her decision.
AFP
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