*Texas attorney general Ken Paxton said on Monday that he was investigating whether twitter falsely reported the number of automated false accounts on its platform, * and violated a state law designed to protect consumers from false, misleading and deceptive business practices.
"The robot account will not only reduce the quality of users' experience on the platform, but also may exaggerate the value of the company and the cost of doing business with the company, thus directly harming consumers and enterprises in Texas," a [press release] from the Texas attorney general's Office( https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/news/releases/ag-paxton-launches-investigation-against-twitter-potentially-deceiving-texas-consumers-texas ) Say. A robot is a computer program that can perform automatic tasks, such as following users and forwarding content.
The move highlights that Twitter is facing greater pressure after Elon Musk reached an agreement to buy the influential social media website for $44billion. Musk, who runs Tesla and space X, has been putting pressure on Twitter to provide more details about the estimated false and junk accounts on the platform. On Monday, musk threatened to stop trading if he did not get the data he had requested about the accounts. According to the document of the securities and Exchange Commission on April 25, the transaction includes a $1billion termination fee, so musk will not leave easily.
In the first quarter of 2022, twitter estimated that less than 5% of its 229million daily active users were fake or spam accounts. Although twitter also said in its quarterly financial report and annual report that the estimated value may not accurately represent the actual number of false or junk accounts, it may be higher.
Texas is investigating whether twitter falsely reported these figures and violated a law called the Texas fraudulent trading act. The office said that about 20 per cent of users might be robots, but did not cite the sources of these estimates.
Paxton asked twitter to provide documents about its user data before June 27, including documents describing or confirming that Twitter uses to calculate the number of spam and fake accounts on its platform. Twitter declined to comment on the survey. Parag Agrawal, CEO of twitter, tweeted in May that Twitter's estimate of spam and false accounts is "based on multiple manual reviews of thousands of accounts, which are randomly sampled and consistent over a period of time". These accounts are counted as daily active users who can see advertisements by twitter. However, estimating the number of these accounts can be a challenge.
"The difficult challenge is that many seemingly fake accounts are actually real people, while some of the most dangerous spam accounts actually cause the greatest harm to our users appear to be completely legitimate," Agrawal said on twitter.