In the absence of just over a month until Twitter and Elon Musk go head-to-head before Judge Kathaleen McCormick, in a trial that will last five days sometime in October, we can assume that both sides are already working at full capacity to prepare their positions for the court confrontation, because each of them has a lot to gain if you assert your position against the opponent .

But not only did the two opposing sides begin to do their homework, Judge McCormick is also fully immersed in the case. And as we can read in CBS News, he gave orders to Twitter and Elon Musk to provide more documentation about the epicenter of the problem, that is, the information that both sides are dealing with in relation to the number of bots on the platform. Recall that Twitter estimated this at 5% of all accounts, while Elon Musk points out that this number is actually higher and requires more information from the managers of the social network.

You’d think McCormick would turn exclusively to Twitter when asking for this type of information, since it’s the social network’s managers who have the resources and tools to make such inquiries, but that wasn’t the case. On the one hand, she requested additional data from the social network about the company’s estimates that less than 5% of the accounts on its platform are fake, i.e. documentation of the processes undertaken to reach such a conclusion.

On the other side, he also asked Elon Musk to provide documentation of the counter-tests performed by his team and on which it claims to rely to conclude that the volume of accounts is greater than the 5% reported by Twitter. And this, let’s not forget, is a key element, because it is what Elon Musk relies on to justify his withdrawal from the purchase operation without having to pay any compensation for the failure to fulfill the obligation established between the parties when signing the purchase agreement. contract.

Musk claims Twitter didn’t provide enough details about the number of fake accounts on its platform, claiming that up to 30% of Twitter’s “monetizable daily active users” or mDAUs may be spam or bot accounts. Twitter says the mDAU metric helps it measure the number of accounts on its platform that advertisers can target, making them “monetizable.”

Additionally, The judge also rejected more extensive requests for data from Musk’s lawyers.which he described as «absurdly widenoting that a literal reading of the request would require Twitter to create “billions and trillions of data points” reflecting all the data collected on roughly 200 million accounts over three years. Instead, McCormick ordered Twitter to produce information about the 9,000 accounts that were reviewed in connection with the company’s fourth-quarter audit, a subset of the data that was described as a “historical snapshot.”