John Paul M. Joaquin Tech 08.26.2022 09:Aug AM EDT

Elon Musk Gets Access to ‘Small but Important’ Twitter Data, Court Says

Elon Musk now has a chance to see if Twitter is telling the truth or not.

A Delaware judge has recently ordered Twitter to hand over some of its data to Musk in regards to how it calculates bot and fake accounts on its platform, per the Financial Times.

Musk and Twitter are currently preparing to meet each other in court due to Musk's abrupt withdrawal from the acquisition deal he signed with Twitter.

Twitter 2021 Audit Data Details

Delaware Court of Chancery Judge Kathaleen McCormick has recently ordered Twitter to provide a subset of the data Musk is requesting to help Musk determine the number of spam accounts on the platform.

According to a report from Engadget, Musk's team has been requesting from the court access to "all of the data Twitter might possibly store for each of the approximately 200 million accounts included in its mDAU count every day for nearly three years."

However, Judge McCormick rejected Musk's request to access the data in question, calling the amount of data they're requesting an "absurdly broad" amount of data.

As a result, Judge McCormick denied Musk's request as Twitter is having "difficulties quantifying the burden of responding to that request because no one in their right mind has ever tried to undertake such an effort."

However, Judge McCormick does agree that more data from Twitter is needed for Musk's team to build a case against Twitter.

You may remember that Musk suddenly backed out of his acquisition deal with Twitter as he believes that the social media platform has been deceiving investors about the number of bots and faker accounts it has on its platform.

As such, the judge gave Musk access to a subset of the data he is requesting, which is made of the data from the 9,000 accounts Twitter analyzed for authenticity as part of an audit at the end of 2021.

In addition to these pieces of data, Judge McCormick wants Twitter to share some material related to other internal discussions or analyses regarding "crucial metrics" about its user base beyond the mDAU metric.

These internal discussions or analyses, which Twitter calls "historical snapshots," show how the company chose the accounts it wants to undergo review.

Judge McCormick has given Twitter the time it needs to recreate the "historical snapshot" it used in the fourth quarter of 2021; Twitter mentioned that the snapshot in question no longer exists and that it needs two weeks to recreate it.

Musk's Reaction To The Access

Although Twitter has declined to comment on Judge McCormick's orders, Musk's team, which is led by Alex Spiro, said that they are looking forward to reviewing the subset of the data Twitter has been hiding for many months, per Reuters.

Should the data provided reveal that Twitter has indeed been hiding the actual number of bots and fake accounts on its platform, Musk can bid to end his acquisition deal with the social media platform.