Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced the launch of an investigation against Twitter over false reporting of its fake bot accounts as it might violate the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act. The announcement came mere hours after Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, declared that Twitter had breached his buyout deal because of bots. Today I’m investigating Twitter for potentially misleading Texans on the number of its “bot” users. I have a duty to protect Texans if Twitter is misrepresenting how many accounts are fake to drive up their revenue.https://t.co/OZbwdV3pnY — Texas Attorney General (@TXAG) June 6, 2022 Elon Musk and Twitter Bots Twitter claims that the bot accounts on its platform are less than 5%, but the AG’s office says this might be false as bots accounts could be as high as 20%. According to AG Paxton, he says he has to protect Texans from Twitter if it is ‘misrepresenting how many accounts are fake to drive up their revenue.’ “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,” his office said in a press statement. The social media site has until June 27 to produce documents on how it calculates and manages its user data and connects these numbers to Twitter’s advertising businesses. The filing by Paxton came just hours after Tesla CEO Elon Mus...
