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March 29, 2024

Owning Twitter is tricky because the platform faces regulatory scrutiny and is embroiled in debates about free speech online. Its business is also facing difficulties, especially in the highly competitive digital advertising market. Twitter reported first-quarter revenue growth of 16%, below its forecast of 20%, after Musk struck a deal to acquire it.

A few weeks later, Musk tweeted that the deal was on hold, saying he wanted more details on the number of spam and fake accounts. He has said that a deal with Twitter at a lower price is “not impossible.” He also responded to a tweet from Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, who posted details on how the company detects and combats spam, complete with the poop emoji.

Behind the scenes, Twitter continues to give Musk and his team information about its platform, the people said. Last month, the company agreed to give Musk direct access to its “firehose,” the millions of tweets that flow through the company’s network every day. About 5 percent of its accounts have been spam since it went public in 2013, Twitter said, a number it said was an estimate.

Even so, the number of fake accounts remains a concern for Musk. For years, before proposing the acquisition, he complained about spam on Twitter and said the company should do more to verify the identities of its users. In 2020, he appeared at a Twitter employee event and said the company should do more to prevent spam.

last month, in six paragraph letterMusk’s lawyers have since demanded more information from Twitter about its method of counting fake accounts, claiming that the company is “actively resisting and thwarting” his rights. They said the company “rejected Mr Musk’s request for data” to disclose the number of fake accounts on its platform. The lawyers continued that this amounted to a “clearly material breach” of the deal, saying it gave Musk the right to rescind the agreement.

Twitter said on Thursday it had stepped up efforts to detect and block spam after Russia used fake accounts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The company added new requirements to its registration process and said it uses human auditors to review the volume of its spam accounts. It also said it deletes 1 million spam accounts a day and locks millions of accounts every week until the operators of those accounts pass anti-spam tests.



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