According to an 83-page disclosure, whistleblower and former head of security at Twitter Peiter Zatko said the microblogging platform makes the true scale of fake and spam accounts on the service very unclear, which Zatko alleges is deliberately misleading — a claim that can back up Elon Musk's contention that the social media company underreported the number of active bots.
The explosive allegations made by former Twitter head of security-turned-whistleblower Peiter Zatko against the microblogging giant could not have come at a better time for Elon Musk, who is currently mired in a legal battle with the company after he agreed to buy out the social media platform and then backed out of the deal.
According to an 83-page confidential disclosure sent to the US Congress and federal agencies last month — accessed by CNN, Time, and The Washington Post — Zatko said he began asking about the prevalence of bot accounts on the platform in early 2021 and was told by Twitter's head of site integrity that the company was not sure of the number of total bots on its platform.
He alleges that he came away from conversations with the integrity team with the understanding that the company "had no appetite to properly measure the prevalence of bots," partly because if the actual number became public, it could harm the company's value and reputation.
Musk, while backing out of the deal, had cited the "inaccurate number of bots" being disclosed to him as the dealbreaker.
While the initial...
(The Lion) — A Senate Democrat has proposed a bill to repeal the federal Education Freedom Tax Credit, which passed in President Donald Trump’s budget bill last year. Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Arizona, m...