Posted on 06/06/2022 3:20:13 PM PDT by CodeToad
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has launched an investigation against "Twitter for potentially deceiving Texas consumers" as well as Texas businesses, over fake bot accounts on the platform.
This comes after Elon Musk's attorney filed a letter saying that the $44 billion acquirement deal could be on the rocks if Twitter doesn't reveal the number of fake accounts on the platform.
Paxton released the information about the investigation that Twitter is in violation of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, saying "Twitter has received intense scrutiny in recent weeks over claiming in its financial regulatory filings that fewer than 5% of all users are bots, when they may in fact comprise as much as 20% or more. The difference could dramatically affect the cost to Texas consumers and businesses who transact with Twitter.
"To address this concern, Attorney General Paxton issued a Civil Investigative Demand (CID) to investigate whether Twitter’s reporting on real versus fake users is 'false, misleading, or deceptive' under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act. The CID requires Twitter to turn over documents related to how it calculates and manages its user data and how these numbers relate to Twitter’s advertising businesses. Twitter has until June 27 to respond to Attorney General Paxton’s Demand."
(Excerpt) Read more at thepostmillennial.com ...
Oooooh, Twatter is having a bad run lately. Let me get the world’s smallest violin out.
If they are selling ad space based on knowingly false numbers then that likely is a criminal act. Across state lines too. Where’s Merrick Garland and his heroes? Oh yeah right. He’s too busy going after trespassers whom his cops let into the building.
This comes after Elon Musk’s attorney filed a letter saying that the $44 billion acquirement deal could be on the rocks if Twitter doesn’t reveal the number of fake accounts on the platform.
It is flat out fraud when twitter says ad costs is per hit and the hit is a bot twitter created.
For those that might not know, a ‘bot’ (short for ‘robot’) is simply a piece of software that runs on twitter’s computing systems and mimics a user. A bot might be programmed to post messages or respond to another post or simply hit ‘Like’. This increases the count of activities on twitter’s web site and people get charged advertising costs for each activity a bot is responsible for creating.
Advertising on the web is usually per ‘hit’, or page view. Someone goes to a web page and an ad is shown to them, and the advertising customer is charged, say, 4 cents for that customer viewing that advertisement. So, a bot is theft through fraud because the advertiser is charged 4 cents for showing an advertisement to a robot and not a human.
Buy it, or just destroy it? I’m thinking he was out to embarrass it and cause it’s stock price to plummet, and to maybe get them in trouble with the law.
ha ha
Let this be the beginning of the High Tech Monstrosity’s demise.
He might not have known it, but he surely suspected it.
Nevertheless, always happy to see commie bastards fall.
“a ‘bot’ (short for ‘robot’) is simply a piece of software that runs on twitter’s computing systems and mimics a user.”
That makes it sounds as if the bot sw is hosted on the twitter servers. Better to say it is sw running “against” their systems and mimics a user.
No, it is often right on their servers. Trying to split hairs is retarded.
“He might not have known it, but he surely suspected it.”
Actually, many in the industry could determine the bots were at least 40%. How? Simply matching the hit count to Internet traffic. EVERYTHING on the Internet is logged and traceable. There is no anonymity on the Internet, not even on FR.
Twitter has been claiming at least 40% more hits than the traffic to and from twitter suggest there should be.
IF there is a ‘pool’ going, I bet he will pay about 18% of original offer.
IF THAT...
So the binary for the bot making the twitter web requests against the twitter api endpoints is executed on the twitter servers? Where it gets executed is not hair splitting.
Leftists are saying that this is retaliation and just an attempt to support Musk and that Texas is diverting resources that should have been used on the school shooting.. Oh and the AG is a crook anyway.
They are completely delusional. They don’t live in anything that in any way resembles reality.
The board members and CxO should be held personally liable for this and have to pay back shareholders for their losses. They invested in a company that lied about their performance/financials.
This will be the lt anyone ever hears about it. Vote fraud investigation still going on?
And the one thing they don’t contemplate at all is that faking the number of users is securities fraud. That doesn’t matter to then at all.
“faking the number of users is securities fraud.”
Where the bots were launched from is very important.
If on twitter servers, that is hard smoking gun evidence of fraud.
If it was bots that are commonly used by issue advocacy groups, movie stars, politicians, product promotion, etc. , to create buzz and activity, then it has to be proven that twitter knew those external bots mimicking users were bots, and they lied about the extent.
Their plausibly deniability is “Our bot detection was not adequate to detect all bot activity.”. If twitter altered their bot detection code to look the other way in some ways, and that can be proven, that is hard smoking gun evidence of fraud.
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