SAN FRANCISCO — Elon Musk alleges Twitter is vastly undercounting the number of spam and bot accounts on its platform. A new whistleblower complaint from a recently fired top Twitter executive could add ammunition to that argument, though it provides little hard evidence to back up a key assertion.
Former head of security Peiter Zatko accuses Twitter of “Lying about Bots to Elon Musk” in a whistleblower complaint filed in July with regulators, including the Securities and Exchange Commission, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post.
Zatko, a well-known figure in the security community, alleges Twitter is not incentivized to tally the true number of bots and spammy accounts on the service, which counts 238 million daily users. And he lays out another argument that could give Musk a potential boost in his fight to prove Twitter broke its contract when he agreed to acquire the company for $44 billion: that Twitter deceived regulators regarding its defenses against hackers.
Importantly, however, Zatko provides limited hard documentary evidence in his complaint regarding spam and bots, so the potential impact of those allegations is difficult to initially gauge.
Twitter has repeatedly pushed back against the argument that it does not tally or work intensely to combat bots and spam. In May, CEO Parag Agrawal said the company removes half a million spam and bot accounts each day, a number the company updated in July to one million a day.
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