Elon Musk Causes Twitter Spam Accounts To Be Investigated By SEC

Ever since Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, tried to exit his deal to purchase Twitter, there has been a lot of attention on how many bots the social media site has.

Musk claims his reason for trying to not continue with the purchase is that Twitter have not been transparent about the amount of bots that they have. Lawsuits are now involved and it will be going to court.

According to recent filings, it seems that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) asked Twitter in June how the site works out the number of spam and fake accounts it has. The SEC also asked for further details on how Twitter found an error in the monthly daily active users from 2019, which Twitter confessed that it had overestimated these figures previously.

The SEC wrote:

“Given that the error persisted for three years, please tell us how you concluded there was not a material weakness in your internal control over financial reporting and that your disclosure controls and procedures were effective as of March 31, 2022,”

Wilson Sonsini, who is one of the lawyers working for Twitter, acknowledged the SEC’s questions saying that user accounts are randomly selected and are reviewed manually by staff members. The staff are given a set of rules that outline spam behaviours and if any of the randomly selected accounts go against any of these rules, they are considered spam.

Twitter also explained that they don’t think there is a ‘material weakness’ in the financial reporting due to the overestimation of the monthly daily active users in the past, saying:

“The overstatement represented less than one percent of mDAU for each of the quarters from the fourth quarter of 2020 through the fourth quarter of 2021,”

We are sure this will probably not be the last we hear of the ‘bot drama’ so we will keep you posted.