Tale of the war with bots – Business – Kommersant

The court hearing on the dispute between Elon Musk and Twitter will take place only in October, but the parties have already managed to overwhelm each other with hundreds of pages of claims. Tonight, the social network submitted its arguments to the court. From the company’s responses, it became known that Elon Musk preferred a free online service to an “expensive” audit and that Twitter itself has never been a microblogging service.

Twitter filed the most detailed response with the Delaware Court of Chancery (.pdf) to Elon Musk’s claims on deal for $44 billion. In the 127-page document, the company says it never tried to “deceive” Mr. Musk into the deal to buy Twitter, as it was originally his own initiative.

Twitter calls all the billionaire’s pretexts to withdraw from the agreement “a story invented for trial that contradicts evidence and common sense.”

Recallthat on July 9, Elon Musk notified Twitter that he was refusing to buy the company, alleging violations of several provisions of the deal agreement. July 13 Twitter filed a lawsuit in the Delaware Court of Chancery, demanding that Mr. Musk complete the deal. And July 29 is already a billionaire filed a counterclaim against the company, and that is what Twitter’s lawyers are now responding to.

Earlier, Mr. Musk’s lawyers explained that the reason for the businessman’s refusal to buy Twitter was the presence on the social network of many fake and spam accounts, data about which the company’s representatives did not provide to the businessman at the conclusion of the transaction.

From a Twitter response, it became known that Mr. Musk’s legal team refused to conduct a review of the social network’s internal documentation before concluding a purchase agreement, as the billionaire considered this procedure “too expensive and inefficient.”

Instead, Mr. Musk, according to the company’s response, used the public Internet service Botometer to assess the possible proportion of fake accounts in the microblogging service.

“The ‘peer review’ Mask is nothing more than the result of processing incorrect data with a universal web tool… It relies on an Internet application called Botometer, which uses measurement methods that are different from those of Twitter, and which earlier in this determined that Musk himself is highly likely a bot,” the document says. The company accuses the billionaire of distorting the data, as well as deliberately spreading erroneous judgments throughout the network. “So who’s the bot now, mate?” Twitter says.

At the same time, just a couple of days after signing the deal, Twitter reported that it had been incorrectly counting the number of active users for years.

And Elon Musk believes that hiding this information from him is one of the reasons why he has the right to withdraw from the deal. However, as Twitter explains, the company felt that handing over an internal document to a person who had repeatedly been caught on the disclosure of insider information on the same Twitter was not a good idea.

At least until he signs a non-disclosure agreement.

In addition, Twitter took issue with Mr. Musk’s interpretation that the company is “a microblogging social network where users can share 280-character messages called tweets.” According to the company, “Twitter is a global platform for real-time expression and communication, including in the form of tweets.”

Twitter also saw an obvious error in Mr. Musk’s claim that a tweet is a message “280 characters long”, noting that 280 characters is the maximum length of a tweet, not just the length.

However, in the heat of this dispute, the parties nevertheless found things that they look at in the same way. For example, Twitter agrees that Elon Musk is a billionaire who founded many companies, that he is a user of a social network with more than 100 million subscribers, and finally that Twitter really fights bots.

Note that the text of Elon Musk’s counterclaim against Twitter, filed on July 29, has not yet been made public – this will happen only tonight. But from Twitter’s response to it, it is already known that just listing the arguments against the legality of the transaction took Mr. Musk “more than 90 pages.”

Kirill Sarkhanyants