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Reports: Twitter to provide data about spam accounts to Elon Musk

Published June 09,2022
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Twitter is reportedly planning to comply with potential buyer Elon Musk's demand to provide more data about spam accounts.

According to The Washington Post, Twitter plans to give the billionaire entrepreneur full access to its "firehose," an internal database, which includes data and information about the accounts that access the platform.

Early this week, Musk threatened to walk away from his $44 billion deal to acquire Twitter if the company fails to provide data on spam and fake accounts.

In a letter to Twitter's chief legal officer, Vijaya Gadde, which was disclosed in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, Musk's legal team Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP, has claimed that Twitter was in a "clear material breach" of its obligations and that Musk reserves all rights to terminate the merger agreement.

"Twitter has, in fact, refused to provide the information that Mr Musk has repeatedly requested since May 9, 2022 to facilitate his evaluation of spam and fake accounts on the company's platform," the letter reads.

"Mr Musk has made it clear that he does not believe the company's lax testing methodologies are adequate so he must conduct his own analysis. The data he has requested is necessary to do so," it added.

Twitter has previously claimed that only less than 5% of its daily active users are bots. However, Musk has asked Twitter to provide him with information about its testing methodologies to support its claims about bots and fake accounts.

Musk has also called for doing his own independent assessment based on Twitter data. He has alleged that the actual number of spam accounts could be much more than 5%, even reaching as high as 90%.

Apparently, Musk will now get access to the data he asked for. The "firehose" contains information about every tweet that's sent, what device it is sent on and other information about the account.