Elon Musk challenges Twitter CEO to ‘public debate’ on bot data

• Elon Musk issued a “challenge” to Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal on Saturday.
• The billionaire Tesla and SpaceX CEO have called for a public debate on how Twitter should report spam bots and fake accounts.
• Musk has repeatedly accused Twitter of having more bots than it reports, citing this as one of the reasons he doesn’t want to buy the company.

Elon Musk is once again challenging Twitter over the data it provides on spam bots and fake accounts, and this time he wants a public debate to address the issue.

Responding a Twitter thread Cybersecurity researcher Andrea Stropa summarizes Mook’s rebuttal against Twitter, Tesla and the SpaceX CEO. He wrote He said Saturday that he would go ahead with a $44 billion takeover of Twitter if the social platform revealed how it tracked bots.

“Twitter should simply go ahead with the original terms if their method of displaying the 100 accounts and how they are proven to be genuine. However, this should not be the case if their SEC filings are materially false,” he wrote.

In follow-up Twitter he Added: “I challenge @paraga for a public debate about Twitter bot percentage. Prove to the public that Twitter has <5% fake or spammy daily users!" Also a PollAsking for a yes or no answer to the question “Less than 5% of Twitter’s daily users are fake/spam.”

Data on Twitter users, which were actually bots and fake accounts, was crucial in Musk’s legal battle with the company.

When Musk said he wanted out of the deal to buy Twitter, one of the key reasons he cited was his belief that Twitter had more bots and fake accounts than it was letting on. He also accused Twitter of withholding the bot’s data from him, which the company denied.

The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX has said he thinks at least 20 percent of Twitter’s daily active users are fake or spam accounts. While Twitter says the number is less than 5 percent, Musk says he hasn’t seen evidence to support that number and won’t go ahead with the deal until it does.

In a recent lawsuit filed against the company, Musk accused Twitter of intentionally “misrepresenting” the number of spam accounts on the platform as part of what he called “a scheme to mislead investors about the company’s future prospects.”