Proudly owning Twitter is hard as a result of the platform faces regulatory scrutiny and is embroiled in a debate over free speech on-line. Its enterprise has additionally confronted difficulties, particularly in a aggressive marketplace for digital promoting. After Mr. Musk struck the acquisition settlement, Twitter reported 16 p.c development in income for the primary quarter, under the 20 p.c it had predicted.
Inside weeks, Mr. Musk tweeted that the deal was on maintain, saying he needed extra particulars in regards to the quantity of spam and pretend accounts. At one level, he mentioned hanging a deal for Twitter at a cheaper price was “not out of the query.” He additionally responded to tweets from Parag Agrawal, Twitter’s chief government, who posted particulars of how the corporate detects and fights spam, with a poop emoji.
Behind the scenes, Twitter continued giving Mr. Musk and his group entry to details about its platform, individuals with data of the scenario have mentioned. Final month, the corporate agreed to permit Mr. Musk direct entry to its “firehose,” the day by day stream of hundreds of thousands of tweets that circulate by means of the corporate’s community. Twitter, which has mentioned roughly 5 p.c of its accounts are spam because it went public in 2013, has additionally mentioned the quantity is an estimate.
Even so, the variety of faux accounts remained a priority for Mr. Musk. For years earlier than proposing the acquisition, he complained about spam on Twitter and mentioned the corporate ought to do extra to authenticate its customers. In 2020, he appeared at a Twitter worker occasion and mentioned the corporate ought to do extra to forestall spam.
Final month, in a six-paragraph letter, Mr. Musk’s attorneys demanded extra info from Twitter about its strategies for counting faux accounts and claimed the agency was “actively resisting and thwarting” his rights. The corporate was “refusing Mr. Musk’s information requests” to reveal the variety of faux accounts on its platform, they mentioned. That amounted to a “clear materials breach” of the deal, the attorneys continued, saying it gave Mr. Musk the appropriate to interrupt off the settlement.
Twitter mentioned on Thursday that it had heightened efforts to detect and block spam after Russia used faux accounts to affect the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The corporate has added new necessities to its sign-up course of and mentioned it used human auditors to vet its tally of spam accounts. It additionally mentioned it eliminated a million spam accounts every day, and locked hundreds of thousands extra per week till the operators of the accounts handed anti-spam checks.
