According to the NY Post’s reporting, a second leak is presently considering the ramifications of testifying in the next court battle between Elon Musk and Twitter, which is set to begin on October 17 at the Delaware Court of Chancery. If the would-be whistleblower decides to participate in the trial, he would probably mention a Twitter internal study from a few years ago that revealed that up to 30% of the platform’s daily active users were bots or phoney accounts. The second key witness revealed in an interview with NY Post that Twitter executives had laughed when they were shown the study’s results: Remember that Pieter “Mudge” Zatko, the first Twitter insider, served as the social media company’s security chief from January 2022 until he was fired for allegedly bringing up issues of persistent mismanagement at Twitter, including security lapses, technical issues, and non-compliance with a privacy agreement with the Federal Trade Commission that had already been signed (FTC). Mudge has said that Twitter’s leadership lack the means and motivation to look into the actual number of bots that are present on the social media network. However, Elon Musk’s position confronts two significant obstacles. First, Twitter’s legal team recently revealed that the two independent experts Musk hired to estimate the number of bots or phoney accounts that populate the social media site refuted Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s assertions that up to 90% of Twitter engagements might have been generated by bots. In particular, Cyabra and CounterAction have now determined that the percentage of phoney accounts on Twitter in early July was 11 percent and 5.3 percent, respectively. Additionally, Twitter employs monetizable Daily Active Users (mDAUs), which are vaguely defined in Twitter’s publications, as its primary metric for measuring user growth. As an example, this metric includes everybody who might be exposed to advertisements or compensated Twitter services. Therefore, even if the second whistleblower’s allegations are verified, it is unclear how this finding will affect the platform’s mDAUs measure. Elon Musk’s general accusations against Twitter will nevertheless receive a significant confidence boost if the formal allegations made by the second whistleblower are proven true in court.
