Texas Attorney General Investigates Twitter Over Bot Counts
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Elon Musk and Twitter Bots
Twitter claims that the bot accounts on its platform are less than 5%, but the AG’s office says this might be false as bots accounts could be as high as 20%. According to AG Paxton, he says he has to protect Texans from Twitter if it is ‘misrepresenting how many accounts are fake to drive up their revenue.’
“Attorney General Paxton issued a Civil Investigative Demand (CID) to investigate whether Twitter’s reporting on real versus fake users is ‘false, misleading, or deceptive’ under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act,” his office said in a press statement.
The social media site has until June 27 to produce documents on how it calculates and manages its user data and connects these numbers to Twitter’s advertising businesses.
The filing by Paxton came just hours after Tesla CEO Elon Musk sent a letter to Twitter accusing the company of not providing information on bot requests. Per the securities filing from June 6, Musk’s lawyers accused the social media platform that it was “actively resisting and thwarting (Musk’s) information rights”, an action that can be described as a “material breach.”