Description:
According to documents filed in a Delaware court on Thursday, billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, who is trying to back out of his agreement to buy Twitter Inc., is looking for information from ad technology companies in order to learn more about bot and spam accounts on Twitter.
Tesla"s CEO has accused Twitter of withholding information about how it determines the percentage of bots using its site, and Twitter has responded by suing him for trying to break the $44 billion deal. Oct. 17 is the date of the trial.
Integral Ad Science (IAS) and DoubleVerify have both been served subpoenas by Musk"s attorneys demanding any records or correspondence regarding their participation in account reviews or audits of Twitter"s user base.
Technology is used by the New York-based companies DoubleVerify and IAS to independently confirm that real people are viewing digital adverts. Advertisers utilise these services to ensure that real people, not simply automated bots, view the advertisements they pay for.
Requests for comment from Twitter, IAS, and DoubleVerify were not immediately fulfilled.
Musk tweeted: "Those are the questions that Twitter is doing everything possible to prevent answering" in response to a tweet from a user who questioned how Twitter audits its service and also included a link to a Reuters article about Musk attacking the ad firms.
Musk alleged that Twitter"s monetizable daily active customers are 65 million fewer than what the business has stated in a countersuit filed earlier this month. According to Twitter, its disclosures are accurate.
According to Twitter filings, the metric evaluates users who access Twitter through websites or applications that can display advertisements or use paid services like subscriptions.