On Friday May 13, a first twist shook the Internet: the billionaire Elon Musk announces to pause the process of acquiring Twitter, following allegations of the social network about the number of fake accounts it hosts.
He then explains that he wants to verify the figures provided by the company, which ensures that they represent less than 5% of the overall volume of users.
Elon Musk then announces, still on Twitter, as usual, that his teams have randomly selected a sample of 100 accounts in order to analyze it and compare its results to those of Twitter.
The billionaire even invites his subscribers to “repeat the same process to see what they discover”. Then, a few hours later, the businessman gives some news, which doesn’t seem very good.
Indeed, he indicates that the firm’s lawyers called him to accuse him of having violated his confidentiality agreements.
By revealing his method of calculating the number of fake accounts, Elon Musk has indeed specified that he uses the same process as Twitter itself.
Obviously, this indiscretion did not please the company at all, which could worsen relations between the two protagonists. The situation is already particularly unstable, after the revelations concerning Elon Musk’s plans to lay off many employees to increase the firm’s profitability.
Especially since the billionaire multiplies the attacks on Twitter. A few days ago, the latter also accused the platform of manipulating its users through its algorithm.
Following these allegations, Jack Dorsey, creator of the social network, reacted by explaining that the algorithm “was designed simply to save you time when you are away from the application for a while”, and that it just refresh the newsfeed to get things back to normal.