Twitter whistleblower claims the company is lying to Elon Musk about bots

Peter «Mudge» Zatko, a Twitter platform informant, claims that Twitter lied to Musk about how many of its users are actually bots. Zatko emphasizes that tweets by the platform’s CEO, Parag Agrawal, «misleadingly suggest that the social network uses proactive, sophisticated systems to find and block spam bots. The reality is different: Twitter has mostly outdated, uncontrolled, simple scripts, and understaffed and inefficient development teams.»

In a statement to Twitter employees, Agrawal said that Zatko was fired because of inefficiency and poor performance, and his story was «full of inconsistencies and inaccuracies.»

Musk commented on the whistleblower’s complaint via Twitter:

Lawyers suggest that the whistleblower’s complaint has added uncertainty to Musk’s conflict with Twitter and will not have a significant impact on the case. According to corporate law experts, everything Zatko says is in Twitter’s favor.

As a reminder, in the case of Twitter and Elon Musk, the judge decided to order several Twitter employees and former Chief Product Officer Kayvon Bakepour to provide information on the number of spam accounts on the social network, something that Elon Musk insisted on.

In early July, Musk filed a notice of withdrawal from the Twitter acquisition deal, accusing the platform of having a large percentage of fake accounts. Soon after, Twitter sued Musk to force him to buy the platform for $ 44 billion. Amid these events, Twitter shares fell by 7%.