Elon Musk tries to stop Twitter's attempt to hold a quick trial as it could obscure the truth about the real number of spam and bot accounts. The platform is seeking a trial in September, while Musk wants February, which is also considered fast.
Elon Musk's lawyers have responded to a Twitter request filed in court for an expedited trial. The platform requested that the case be heard as early as September, which is extremely fast. Musk's lawyers wrote in a 14-page document that Twitter officials are unfairly pushing for a trial and asked that the case be heard next year, according to Bloomberg.
Musk's legal team explained that the lawsuit would require “forensic review and analysis of large swaths of data” to show that Twitter's customer base is riddled with spam and bot accounts. This issue was the reason Musk initially put the deal on hold. The buyer is requesting that the trial be held on February 13, 2023, which is also “an extremely rapid schedule for a case of this enormous magnitude.” On July 19, the judge will hold a hearing on whether the case should be expedited.
Musk pulled out of the Twitter deal on July 8, saying in a regulatory filing that the platform had made misleading claims about the number of spam/bot accounts on it. In addition, Twitter did not cooperate with the buyer to provide him with the requested information. In the new document, Musk's lawyers also wrote about this, pointing out that officials of the platform have suspended the release of information about spam/bot accounts in order to obtain a “tactical delay” that would bolster their claim for an expedited trial.
“Twitter’s sudden request for warp speed after two months of foot-dragging and obfuscation is its latest tactic to shroud the truth about spam accounts long enough to railroad defendants into closing,” lawyers said in the filing.
“The core dispute over false and spam accounts is fundamental to Twitter’s value,” Musk’s lawyers wrote. “It is also extremely fact and expert intensive, requiring substantial time” for pretrial exchanges of information.
While Twitter had passed a “firehose” of data to Musk earlier, only after he filed a legal request, it did not actually provide a lot of data about the bots, but instead offered “a bespoke partial data set structured to make the necessary machine analysis impossible.”
© 2022, Eva Fox | Tesmanian. All rights reserved.
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About the Author
Eva Fox
Eva Fox joined Tesmanian in 2019 to cover breaking news as an automotive journalist. The main topics that she covers are clean energy and electric vehicles. As a journalist, Eva is specialized in Tesla and topics related to the work and development of the company.
