Musk v. Twitter.

The Only cure for lost illusions is fresh illusions.

According to the WSJ, Twitter Inc. (TWTR) officials on Thursday, 7/7/2022, doubled down on defending the accuracy of their calculation of spam on the platform, addressing an issue that has become a potential stumbling block in Elon Musk’s $44 billion deal to buy the company.

Elon Musk is seeking to terminate his $44 billion agreement to buy Twitter, saying that the company hasn’t provided the necessary data and information he needs to assess the prevalence of fake or spam accounts, according to a regulatory filing Friday.

Twitter “is in material breach of multiple provisions of that agreement” and appears to have made “false and misleading representations” when agreeing, according to a letter from Mr. Musk’s lawyer filed with securities regulators.

The filing caps nearly two months of high-stakes suspense over Mr. Musk’s intentions while setting up a possible legal battle over what comes next for the social-media platform.

Bret Taylor, chairman of Twitter’s board of directors, tweeted Friday afternoon that the committee plans to pursue legal action to enforce the deal at a price and terms initially agreed.

Around 70% of Mr. Musk’s followers on Twitter are spam, fake or inactive, versus 41% for all other accounts with between 65 million and 120 million followers, according to an estimate last month from SparkToro LLC, a maker of audience-research software. Across the company’s data set, the average Twitter user has fewer than 100 followers across the company’s data set, and fewer than 10% are fake or spam accounts.

A Twitter bot is a bot software that uses the Twitter API to interact and engage with Twitter users. The Twitter bots can be programmed or automated to perform a specific task or series of tasks. It can autonomously tweet, retweet, like, follow, unfollow, or DM other accounts.

I do love business owners, Wall Street, and journalists attempting to justify a flawed business model.

Mr. Musk is “attracting so much attention to find targets to scam,” said Kaicheng Yang, a computer scientist and Ph.D. candidate at Indiana University who researches bot activity. Yang also built a bot-detection tool called Botometer. “If I were a scammer, would I look at the average user?”

I don’t believe in criticizing just to criticize, so allow me to make a suggestion. For those of us on Twitter who are there to connect with people from around the globe exchanging ideas, let us “all” a process of ID validation from the day we open our account. Then I will be happy to screen my followers based on an ID check.

But alas, social media platforms like big, grandiose numbers that fake accounts garner. The truth hurts, but Musk is unwilling to buy(literally pay for) the BS. Or will he?

Soap operas are filled with such drama.

Until next time. Stay safe.