After Peiter Zatko, a second Twitter whistleblower could appear at Elon Musk trial: Report

Another Twitter whistleblower is mulling over testifying when Elon Musk confronts the company in court over his $44 billion acquisition bid later in two weeks. He may have some interesting things to say regarding bots, reported the New York Post.

The possible new tipster would concentrate on an alleged internal study confirming that the site’s bot problem is much larger than Twitter has acknowledged, in contrast to Peiter Zatko, a Twitter whistleblower who did not include the words “bots” or “spam” once during his two and a half hour Congressional testimony in September.

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A former employee of Twitter, the would-be whistleblower, says to have contributed to an internal study from years ago that claimed at least 30% of Twitter’s daily active users were automated spam accounts.

The Twitter executive claimed in an interview with The Post that the company’s executives “laughed when they were told about the report and said, ‘We have always had a bot problem.”

His evidence could be advantageous for Musk, who has centred his legal defence of his right to withdraw from the agreement to purchase Twitter on the site’s alleged bot issue.

Musk still has a significant issue, though: the possible leaker is undecided as to whether he wants to speak.

The prospective witness stated, “I haven’t fully decided yet,” adding that he wasn’t sure if he was prepared for the spotlight that would come with testifying at one of the most keenly watched cases in recent memory.

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On Wednesday, the two sides are expected to exchange witness lists, which could provide insight into whether the second whistleblower will show up. Musk’s team served a subpoena on Zatko, but none was served on the second whistleblower.

Both Twitter and Musk’s representatives did not comment on this development yet.

The purported tipster said that Twitter’s preferred metric for measuring bots, known as Monetizable Daily Active Users, or mDAUs, is excessively limited and falls short of accurately capturing the scope of the site’s spam issue.

He claimed that while Twitter may not be lying when it states that less than 5% of its mDAUs are bots, the firm has not been honest with investors and objects to the very notion of using mDAU as a measurement in the first place.

Twitter claims to have 238 million daily active users (mDAUs), but the putative whistleblower said that the actual number of daily users is far greater when one takes into consideration automated false accounts that are still active.

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According to him, the spam accounts were recognised due to their bot-like actions, such as tweeting on the hour every hour and replying to tweets within five seconds of when they were posted by another user.

The would-be whistleblower claimed that “the total number of active accounts was higher than the number we reported publicly.”

According to a Twitter insider, the company was not aware of the precise study that the possible whistleblower had detailed, the New York Post reported. Not all automatic accounts on the website are spam, the insider noted. Accounts like @howsmydrivingny, which uses licence plate numbers to search up traffic offences automatically, and @met drawings, which instantaneously posts works in the public domain from the Met’s drawings and prints department, are examples of so-called “good bots” on the website.

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More significantly, the source claimed that since the possible whistleblower doesn’t seem to be alleging fraud or errors in Twitter’s Securities and Exchange Commission filings, he should have no influence on the five-day trial, which is scheduled to begin on October 17 in Delaware, the New York Post report states. Legal experts claim that Musk’s case regarding bots is undermined by his choice to forego due diligence when he initially agreed to acquire Twitter.

The whistleblower said that as part of an agreement to not preserve sensitive corporate information, he was required to erase the report when he left Twitter.