For Musk’s lawyers, it was the opening of a strategy that is expected to lean more heavily on the claims of whistleblower Peiter Zatko, Twitter’s former chief security officer.
“Mr. Zatko, who was responsible for much of this — including processing and removing various spam bots — he was not a low-level employee,” said Musk’s attorney, Alex Spiro. “He was one of the most senior officers in the company.”
“As Mr. Zatko said, management didn’t have the appetite to properly measure bot accounts,” he said.
Twitter’s lawyers, on the other hand, stood by the data requests, citing the sensitivity of the information.
In the 84-page complaint, Zatko alleges that Twitter lied to Musk about bots and spammy accounts, and that the site had egregious security flaws that cast doubt on the validity of his statements to federal regulators — and possibly Musk.
“Twitter executives have little or no personal incentive to ‘detect’ or accurately measure the prevalence of spambots,” the complaint alleges, adding that “willful ignorance was the norm.”
Zatko’s complaint also alleged that Twitter misled regulators about its defenses against cybersecurity threats, a claim that would potentially support Musk’s allegation that Twitter was untruthful in reporting to shareholders.
However, there was little hard documentation to support his claims about spam and bots, and he left the company months before Musk decided to buy Twitter.
Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, agreed to buy Twitter in April for $44 billion, during a period when he was publicly touting the need for free speech on social media. However, Musk tweeted in May that the deal was on hold pending a review of Twitter’s allegations of spam and fake accounts. The turnaround coincided with a drop in Tesla’s stock price and economic pressure on tech stocks that reduced Musk’s net worth and raised questions about his ability to finance the deal.
By July, Musk filed to end the deal over concerns about Twitter’s count of bot and spam profiles, which Musk claims greatly underestimates the true number of inauthentic accounts. Twitter sued Musk alleging breach of contract days later. Musk filed a counterclaim in late July.
The hearing Wednesday, in Delaware Court of Chancery, concerned the ability of Musk’s team to seek information about Twitter’s internal practices and data. The judge previously ruled against Musk’s team when it sought to gather information from more than 20 company executives. One of those executives Musk’s team sought information from was Zatko. But the judge denied the request, raising the possibility that Musk’s side could use the new revelations to reconsider the request.
Twitter has previously disputed characterizations made by the whistleblower and Musk about spam and bots. Several leading artificial intelligence experts have publicly supported Twitter’s methodology for its spam calculations and bots.
Twitter’s attorney, Bradley Wilson, argued in court Wednesday that the spam count was merely an estimate, backed by regulatory disclosures that highlighted the imprecise nature of the count.
“We have an essentially subjective assessment,” Wilson said. “Twitter was doing an assessment and it was very honest that that’s what it was doing.”
He also noted that some of Musk’s team’s requests “explicitly ask for private data” that the company was unwilling to provide, including users’ IP addresses, phone numbers and information about users’ locations.
The hearing opened Wednesday with Spiro arguing that Twitter was contradicting his reasoning for not providing data to Musk’s team, data he says is important to understanding what’s really going on at the company. social media.
“There’s this back and forth, and each time, the goalposts seem to move,” Spiro claimed, referring to requests for more data about spam and bots.
“We’re the potential buyer here and we don’t even know what’s out there,” Spiro said of the data he claimed Twitter is withholding. “That puts us at a huge disadvantage.”
He also claimed Twitter has been involved in scams about user numbers for a long time. He argued that Twitter’s growth had been flat for years and that the company changed the way it calculated user numbers in 2019 to create the appearance of greater growth. Spiro said this fundamental deception is one reason the judge should accept their pleas for more data.
Twitter said it invented the new way to calculate growth in 2019 to give investors a clearer picture of the company’s status.
Spiro raised charges from Zatko’s complaint, alleging that Twitter shut down a key bot-fighting tool, called internally ROPO, for “read-only dialing,” which blocks an account from tweeting until a user can try that it is connected to a truth. person. He claimed a senior executive planned to shut him down completely (Zatko’s claim says the executive tried to shut him down, but Spiro appeared to go further).
The Post previously reported that ROPO was never closed and that the executive proposed a fix, not a shutdown.
Meanwhile, Wilson argued against giving private data to Musk’s team, citing concerns about user privacy and fears of such information “falling into the wrong hands.”
He specifically pointed to Musk’s own statement as evidence that Twitter was at risk if it shared more data. Twitter could lose control of data and individuals with anonymous accounts could be banned, he argued, and private messages exposed.
“This is someone who publicly mocked Twitter. Who has insinuated that this court case will be used as a tool for public disclosure of internal Twitter data. And who recently and publicly reaffirmed that if he is able to get out of the contract he signed, his plan is to start a competing business,” added Wilson.
The judge adjourned the hearing without making a decision.
The trial is set for October.
