Twitter Insists Spam Accounts Represent Fewer Than 5% of Members

Twitter has restated its position that spam accounts represent less than 5% of its members as the social media platform prepares for a legal battle against the world’s richest man.

Twitter made this claim in a letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), responding to a commission request for details on how it came up with its spam numbers, Reuters reported Wednesday (Aug. 24).

“Twitter believes that it already adequately discloses the methodology that it uses in calculating these figures,” the company said in the letter, per the report.

Twitter is readying itself for a courtroom showdown against Tesla owner Elon Musk, who set out to purchase Twitter earlier this year but backed away from the $44 billion deal in July.

Read more: Twitter Preps for Court Battle With Musk

Musk based the end of the agreement on claims that Twitter was in breach of numerous aspects of the merger agreement, including sections dealing with the number and influence of spam bots on the platform.

Musk said in a regulatory filing that Twitter had not “complied with its contractual obligations” to turn over information about how to assess how widespread the bots are on the platform.

See more: Elon Musk Scraps $44B Deal to Buy Twitter

Twitter’s board chairman Bret Taylor said last month that the company is still committed to closing the deal at the agreed price and terms and “plans to pursue legal action to enforce the merger agreement.”

PYMNTS reported last month that legal experts argue Twitter may have a more solid legal footing in the fight. However, the company may not also have much recourse to force Musk to buy the company even if it wins in court.

“What are they going to do if there is a judgment and he says, ‘Well, I’m still not going to buy it,’” Zohar Goshen, professor of transactional law at Columbia Law School, told The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) in July. “They don’t really have tools to force him to go through with it. You don’t put people in jail because they don’t buy something.”