Elon Musk keeps chasing Twitter's bot accounts as he now goes after ad tech companies
We previously reported that Twitter called into question Elon Musk’s methods of determining the number of bot accounts on the platform. The social media giant slammed Musk’s use of Botometer, explaining that Musk wasn’t using the same data as Twitter to measure bot accounts. As it turns out, Twitter’s strong rebuttal hasn’t dissuaded the Tesla CEO from pursuing the spam accounts and he has now subpoenaed ad tech companies Integral Ad Services (IAS) and DoubleVerify according to Reuters.
IAS and DoubleVerify help advertisers determine whether their ads are getting seen by actual people or bots. By probing the companies, Musk’s lawyers are seeking information, including documents, about their possible involvement in reviewing Twitter’s user accounts.
Per Musk, “Twitter is doing everything possible to avoid answering” how it determines the number of spam accounts. The question is an important one since SpaceX CEO’s whole reason for abandoning the US$44 billion Twitter deal is that the site was underreporting the number of bot accounts. So, if Musk can prove that Twitter’s way of calculating spam accounts is flawed, it can potentially help him weather the lawsuit and save him from coughing up US$44 billion for which the multibillionaire sold US$6.9 billion worth of Tesla shares recently.
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