Elon Musk’s ambitions to tackle bots on Twitter are well known, with the billionaire recently threatening to pull out of a $44bn deal should the social media giant not provide enough information about its fake accounts.
According to several news reports, Twitter would have now conceded to Musk’s request, agreeing to provide the tycoon with a “firehose” of raw data, including hundreds of millions of daily tweets.
Reporting on the events, AP said the lawyers involved in the updated deal did not confirm the data-sharing agreement.
Musk has not publicly disclosed any new information about the alleged deal, but Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton took on the social media platform on Monday, launching an investigation that seemed to support the Tesla chief executive’s claims.
“If Twitter has underreported [its] number of fake bot accounts, these numbers might have negatively impacted Texas consumers and businesses,” Paxton wrote. “We need more information – that’s why I’ve launched an investigation to get the answers we need.”
For context, back in April, Twitter said that less than 5% of its 229 million monetizable daily active users were bots.
“We shared an overview of the estimation process with Elon a week ago,” Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal told Musk in May, “and look forward to continuing the conversation with him, and all of you.”
Musk then contended these figures saying that Twitter had significantly underestimated the number of its “spam bots.”
Fast forward to this week’s events, Twitter has not directly commented on the terms of the new alleged agreement but said that it will “continue to cooperatively share information with Mr. Musk to consummate the transaction in accordance with the terms of the merger agreement.”
Twitter added they “intend to close the transaction and enforce the merger agreement at the agreed price and terms.