Twitter wins first round in battle against Elon Musk as judge grants request to fast-track...

[midian182]

What just happened? Twitter has struck the first blow in its legal proceedings against Elon Musk after being granted its request for a fast-tracked trial. The judge said the expedited start date and shorter hearing was necessary as the company continues to suffer while surrounded by uncertainty.

The saga of Elon Musk's attempt to buy Twitter ended earlier this month over the long-running issue of how many fake accounts populate the site. Musk previously claimed Twitter's alleged refusal to reveal bot numbers constituted a material breach of the deal and allowed him to avoid the $1 billion breakup fee.

Unsurprisingly, Twitter's response to Musk dropping out was to launch a lawsuit that it hopes will force the world's richest man to complete the purchase. One of Twitter's first requests was for the trial to be fast-tracked due to the harm inflicted on the company "every hour of every day" due to the disruption.

Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick of the Delaware Court of Chancery has granted Twitter's request and set a trial date for October; Musk's lawyers wanted it to begin next year. The judge has also ordered a five-day trial, adding that the court can handle proceedings in that timeframe. That's still not exactly what Twitter was seeking; it wanted a four-day trial but will still consider this a win.

"Look at all those f***ing bots"

Musk's lawyers say a fast-tracked trial will allow Twitter to hide the truth about what percentage of the platform's accounts are fakes. The company says it is 5%, but Musk claims the figure is more like 20% or more.

Andrew Rossman, Musk's lawyer, said (via Reuters), "When Mr. Musk started asking questions, the answers he got were alarming." He added that it would take months to analyze the massive amounts of data needed to answer Musk's queries regarding bot accounts.

In siding with Twitter, the judge warned that the "cloud of uncertainty" around Twitter would grow larger as it waited for a trial to begin. "The reality is that the delay threatens irreparable harm to the sellers," McCormick said.

Twitter said it is "pleased that the court agreed to expedite this trial." Musk's legal team has not yet responded to the ruling.

Twitter wants Musk, who owns 9.2% of the company, to complete the acquisition at the original offer of $54.20 per share, far above the current value of around $40.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/95366-twitter-wins-first-round-battle-against-elon-musk.html

 

[Plutoisaplanet]

To be fair, by Musk's own admissions the only way to effectively eliminate bots like these is to perform much more expensive human verification, like collecting government identification or performing an audio/video call. Texts are easily automated especially with Twilio, but even using calls need to ensure that humans are unique/discrete.

That said, with Twitter's situation it's impossible to accurately identify bots without contacting users. That means the number of bots likely is well over 5% but it's going to be hard to prove that. On the other hand, botmakers likely care more about existing in the present and not the future, so identifying bots retroactively may be easier.

Last, it is a little funny that Twitter said that they doubled the number of bots they were blocking from signing up from half a million a day in May to one million a day in July. It makes you wonder if there were always a million or more bots attempting to sign up every day. In Q1 Twitter increased by 133k mDAU per day, so is Twitter really saying when blocking 500k bots from signing up per day that less than 1% of those (5% of 133k new mDAU = 6.65k new bots) are being counted as mDAU?

Even if the vast majority of bots that exist on the platform are not being counted as monetizable DAU but are still interacting with the platform, it does seem pertinent to report that as it is affecting the user experience negatively more so each day, and I'm surprised that isn't on Twitter's 8-K filings.

 

[psycros]

To be fair, by Musk's own admissions the only way to effectively eliminate bots like these is to perform much more expensive human verification, like collecting government identification or performing an audio/video call. Texts are easily automated especially with Twilio, but even using calls need to ensure that humans are unique/discrete.

That said, with Twitter's situation it's impossible to accurately identify bots without contacting users. That means the number of bots likely is well over 5% but it's going to be hard to prove that. On the other hand, botmakers likely care more about existing in the present and not the future, so identifying bots retroactively may be easier.

Last, it is a little funny that Twitter said that they doubled the number of bots they were blocking from signing up from half a million a day in May to one million a day in July. It makes you wonder if there were always a million or more bots attempting to sign up every day. In Q1 Twitter increased by 133k mDAU per day, so is Twitter really saying when blocking 500k bots from signing up per day that less than 1% of those (5% of 133k new mDAU = 6.65k new bots) are being counted as mDAU?

Even if the vast majority of bots that exist on the platform are not being counted as monetizable DAU but are still interacting with the platform, it does seem pertinent to report that as it is affecting the user experience negatively more so each day, and I'm surprised that isn't on Twitter's 8-K filings.

Been saying it for years, and I of wish I'd had the money to patent this before cross-site "login with x" became a thing....verified online identities are the only way forward. A VOI would be an online pen name or handle that is your public Internet persona, and it would be administered by an independent organization not unlike the W3. This would be the only entity to have any info about the real person behind the user name. Each identity would be checked to make sure it belongs to a unique human being, and that info would be protected by the strongest security the industry can muster and based entirely in a security-friendly country. Ideally, every person who touched this database would be a hand-picked security or big data pro from across the industry. If the government of the host country wanted access to the identity behind the VOI a fully transparent court order would be required. No secret courts or secret laws. Its a pipe dream, I'm fully aware, but wouldn't it be nice? If your VOI became targeted by too many trolls and haters you could just delete it and make a new one. The creation and deletion dates of VOIs, however, would be posted for anyone to see, but that's it - no other details would be attached. You would only reveal what you wanted to in your profile, and everything you made public would be opt-in. The main goal of a VOI would be to allow people to have a single log in that couldn't be compromised unless the VOI authentication service itself were somehow exploited. It would also help restore public trust in online services if people knew their private data wasn't being sold to every scammer, repressive government and identity thief on the planet. Any service that allowed VOI logins could easily implement free and paid tiers with the free users getting the usual ads and tracking, but only across sites owned by the same company. Google or whoever could still provide the advertising but it wouldn't follow your VOI all over the web. This kind of Internet content model could help restore a balance between user privacy, convenience and online data harvesting.

 

[wiyosaya]

Maybe someday, Musk will learn the inverse relationship between the size of the mouth and the size of the brain, but I'm not getting my hopes up.

 

[terzaerian]

Been saying it for years, and I of wish I'd had the money to patent this before cross-site "login with x" became a thing....verified online identities are the only way forward. A VOI would be an online pen name or handle that is your public Internet persona, and it would be administered by an independent organization not unlike the W3. This would be the only entity to have any info about the real person behind the user name. Each identity would be checked to make sure it belongs to a unique human being, and that info would be protected by the strongest security the industry can muster and based entirely in a security-friendly country. Ideally, every person who touched this database would be a hand-picked security or big data pro from across the industry. If the government of the host country wanted access to the identity behind the VOI a fully transparent court order would be required. No secret courts or secret laws. Its a pipe dream, I'm fully aware, but wouldn't it be nice? If your VOI became targeted by too many trolls and haters you could just delete it and make a new one. The creation and deletion dates of VOIs, however, would be posted for anyone to see, but that's it - no other details would be attached. You would only reveal what you wanted to in your profile, and everything you made public would be opt-in. The main goal of a VOI would be to allow people to have a single log in that couldn't be compromised unless the VOI authentication service itself were somehow exploited. It would also help restore public trust in online services if people knew their private data wasn't being sold to every scammer, repressive government and identity thief on the planet. Any service that allowed VOI logins could easily implement free and paid tiers with the free users getting the usual ads and tracking, but only across sites owned by the same company. Google or whoever could still provide the advertising but it wouldn't follow your VOI all over the web. This kind of Internet content model could help restore a balance between user privacy, convenience and online data harvesting.

Turns out the W3 is way ahead of you, as of 2 hours ago:

https://portswigger.net/daily-swig/w3c-launches-decentralized-identifiers-as-a-web-standard

Decentralized Identifiers Finalized as W3C Recommendation -- Redmondmag.com

The nonprofit World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) on Tuesday announced that its collaborative work on Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) is now a W3C Recommendation, which is at version 1.0.

redmondmag.com

The irony being that I was searching for W3 related news, to point out the inherent weaknesses of relying on a single organization to administrate what you described, so that puts the W3 way ahead of me too.

 

[Uncle Al]

"Musk's lawyers say a fast-tracked trial will allow Twitter to hide the truth about what percentage of the platform's accounts are fakes. The company says it is 5%, but Musk claims the figure is more like 20% or more."

Like any case & potential settlement, decisions are based upon "facts" and should it later be revealed that Twitter submitted false "facts" they are liable and could even see the decision vacated, perhaps even reversed.

Personally, I don't want to see Musk get away with another one of these BS things he is so famous for, but I think the Judge has already given them a cause for appeal by setting a length of time for the trial when he has no idea of what Musks legal team will throw at Twitter or the court.

 

[umbala]

Didn't Musk originally say one of the reasons he was buying Twitter was to eliminate all the bots? Now he won't buy it because there are too many bots? That makes no sense. Everyone on the planet knows the real reason he's trying to weasel out of this deal. He made a ridiculous offer (he seems to be obsessed with offers that end in 420) for Twitter and later realized that POS company isn't even worth a fraction of what he offered.

Not only that, but to buy Twitter he would have to sell a huge chunk of his Tesla shares, which would cause Tesla's value to drop costing him even more than the original ridiculous offer he made. I'm guessing it would cost him more like $100 billion in the end, because his net worth would drop big time after cashing out a bunch of Tesla stock.

 

[wiyosaya]

Didn't Musk originally say one of the reasons he was buying Twitter was to eliminate all the bots? Now he won't buy it because there are too many bots? That makes no sense.

Musk is an expert at not making sense.

 

[wiyosaya]

Turns out the W3 is way ahead of you, as of 2 hours ago:

https://portswigger.net/daily-swig/w3c-launches-decentralized-identifiers-as-a-web-standard

Decentralized Identifiers Finalized as W3C Recommendation -- Redmondmag.com

The nonprofit World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) on Tuesday announced that its collaborative work on Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) is now a W3C Recommendation, which is at version 1.0.

redmondmag.com

The irony being that I was searching for W3 related news, to point out the inherent weaknesses of relying on a single organization to administrate what you described, so that puts the W3 way ahead of me too.

It will be interesting to see what happens with this and whether it turns out to be a solution that has even remote validity. My bet is that people will figure out how to game this, and even, perhaps, figure out how to get bots assigned IDs when they are not real people.

 

[waclark]

Didn't Musk originally say one of the reasons he was buying Twitter was to eliminate all the bots? Now he won't buy it because there are too many bots? That makes no sense. Everyone on the planet knows the real reason he's trying to weasel out of this deal. He made a ridiculous offer (he seems to be obsessed with offers that end in 420) for Twitter and later realized that POS company isn't even worth a fraction of what he offered.

Not only that, but to buy Twitter he would have to sell a huge chunk of his Tesla shares, which would cause Tesla's value to drop costing him even more than the original ridiculous offer he made. I'm guessing it would cost him more like $100 billion in the end, because his net worth would drop big time after cashing out a bunch of Tesla stock.

I don't think it's he "won't buy it" because of bots, but he may negotiate for a lower price saying that the company misreported the number of bots which has a direct impact on its valuation.

 

[Tantor]

I don't think it's he "won't buy it" because of bots, but he may negotiate for a lower price saying that the company misreported the number of bots which has a direct impact on its valuation.

That's an excellent point.

Musk has probably got one of the best business/legal advisory teams on the planet. He didn't accumulate $240 billion by being incompetent.

By the way, I'm not a fan of Musk. There's something about him that doesn't add up.

 

[waclark]

That's an excellent point.

Musk has probably got one of the best business/legal advisory teams on the planet. He didn't accumulate $240 billion by being incompetent.

By the way, I'm not a fan of Musk. There's something about him that doesn't add up.

I'm guessing, but when they started going over the numbers, they probably saw something that tipped them off to the bot number being low. After asking Twitter to clarify, and Twitter being reluctant to be transparent probably set off some warning bells with the financial team.

I think Twitter is being the odd one here. They didn't want to sell, the they agreed to sell, and now they are trying to force the sale without revealing the true bot numbers. I think the Twitter board saw an opportunity to make some money and get out. Until Musk called their bluff.

I think Musk just might be rich and smart, not necessarily charismatic. You might think that a guy who is successful would play well in front of the cameras but I know a few rich and smart guys and they are not that "charming", just rich and/or smart.