Tech tycoon Elon Musk has reportedly accused Twitter of lying about the exact number of bots on its platform.
According to a legal brief made by the Tesla CEO's team, 10% of the social network's daily active members who see ads are fraudulent profiles, according to the New York Times.
Musk deferred his planned acquisition of the social network in mid-July to find out if Twitter's long-standing claim that bots make up less than 5% of its user base is true.
Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and a frequent user of Twitter, reportedly started an ambitious acquisition of the social media platform in April when he became the company's biggest shareholder.
Although Twitter swiftly accepted his offer, they soon got into a disagreement over the number of bogus accounts on the platform; he also claimed that the firm did not give him adequate data access to check the number of bots, according to a report from Engadget.
However, Musk eventually informed the Securities and Exchange Commission that he intended to cancel the transaction due to "false and misleading representations" made by Twitter. In response, Twitter offered him complete access to its internal data.
In this latest filing, Musk's team stated that its analysts identified a significantly larger proportion of fraudulent accounts than Twitter had estimated using Botometer. The Indiana University-developed machine learning system in question that "checks the activity of Twitter accounts" and assigns them a score based on the probability that they are bots.
Twitter Lied About Bot Problem Musk's Lawyers Claim
According to Musk's attorneys, the social network misrepresented its bot issue to persuade Musk to pursue the Twitter buyout at an overvalued price.
"Twitter was miscounting the number of false and spam accounts on its platform, as part of its scheme to mislead investors about the company's prospects. Twitter's disclosures have slowly unraveled, with Twitter frantically closing the gates on information in a desperate bid to prevent the Musk parties from uncovering its fraud," Elon Musk's lawyers also claimed.
The company's petition on Thursday comes in reaction to Musk's countersuit, which he filed under seal last week and which is scheduled to be made public on Friday. Twitter sued Elon Musk last month to pressure him to complete the acquisition.
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The latest turn in a spectacular Elon Musk Twitter legal battle came when the social media company rejected Elon Musk's arguments in court that he had good cause to pull out of a $44 billion deal to buy the platform.
Twitter referred to Musk's justifications for pulling out of the deal as a narrative, created "in an effort to escape a merger agreement that Musk no longer found attractive once the stock market" and with it, his vast personal wealth, diminished in value," according to a document that was made public on Thursday, as per a report from The Guardian.
Musk's answer to Twitter's lawsuit contains "repeated mischaracterizations" of the merger agreement, particularly concerning the metrics Twitter offered.
Twitter Says Musk is The One Lying
Per Axios, Twitter said Elon Musk attacks "alleged inaccuracies" in the social media company's user statistics reports to discontinuing the agreement because he cannot find any inaccurate or deceptive statement of fact in his declaration.
Twitter alleges that Musk "invents representations" about its metrics that Twitter has never made and then attempts to use, selectively, the vast amounts of "confidential data" that Twitter has given him to create a breach of those alleged representations.
