[mayank]

> I still can't get over the banana-pants insanity of the first count... arguing that Twitter lied about its numbers for years specifically so that someone would buy it at an inflated price?

Not a lawyer, so could you explain why this is banana-pants insanity? There's malicious fraud (unlikely) and then there's the more likely case of under-investing in bot-detection and expunging efforts, e.g. "in favor of other priorities", to keep DAUs and subsequently valuations high for a potential sale.

[Invictus0]

Twitter's methodology for checking bot accounts is clear, consistent, and has been detailing in its SEC filings for years. Anyone that cared could have easily double checked them. Recalling from memory, all they did is take a random sampling of accounts and have a human rate the accounts as a bot or not--back when Twitter had an API it would have been even easier to do this.

[jsnell]

No. Nobody outside of Twitter can repeat the analysis.

First, only Twitter knows which users are active (the population being analyzed are the DAUs). People doing bot analysis from publicly available define activity based on the account tweeting, which will probably skew heavily toward spam bots.

Second, the mDAU metric is the DAUs with known bots having been removed. Nobody outside of Twitter knows which active accounts were excluded by Twitter from the metric. Even if 50% of Twitter DAUs are bots, as long as Twitter detects 90% of them as bots and marks them as non-monetized, the 5% number stands.

Third, nobody outside of Twitter can actually do a proper job of evaluating whether an account is a bot, since they have orders of magnitude more signals than a simple tweet stream / public profile information.

Twitters methology is far better than any publicly available bot detection would be, but the flipside is that it's not a replicable methodology.

[runako]

> No. Nobody outside of Twitter can repeat the analysis.

This is true of most material statements provided by companies in every industry:

- Revenue? Trust the company, I cannot independently verify from outside the company.

- Retail same-store sales comparable? Have to trust the company's numbers.

- Headcount? I have to trust their number again here.

- Expenses? I have no way to verify this unless I work at the company, in a very senior position.

Outside verification of data is not a concern relevant to corporate disclosures.

[kergonath]

They must have some internal documentation though, and the process can be looked at during the trial, right?

So it cannot be replicated by third parties, and Musk does not know what he’s talking about (shocker!), but it can be verified a posteriori. And I assume it will be at some point.

[jsnell]

I don't think it would be verified by somebody being given access to Twitter's internal data and redoing their process. At most both sides will trot out some expert witnesses to talk about whether the process / rating guide described in the internal docs are reasonable (what Twitter does doesn't need to be perfect, just not outright fraudulent). I look forward to finding what kind of a kook Musk finds as his expert.

Maybe Musk hopes to find something in discovery to discredit the process, e.g. evidence of the process not being followed, or of the numbers being tampered with.

[kergonath]

> I don't think it would be verified by somebody being given access to Twitter's internal data and redoing their process.

Indeed. But surely they have at least internal audits. They seem like they take this stuff seriously.

> I look forward to finding what kind of a kook Musk finds as his expert

Indeed! If he picks his experts like his lawyers, this could be spectacular.

> e.g. evidence of the process not being followed, or of the numbers being tampered with

Yeah, he sounds like he’s hoping to find a smoking gun where some Twitter higher-up admits fudging the numbers. To be fair, if that is true, then Twitter deserves to be raked over the coals, even though it would not be sufficient to get Musk out of this mess.