Disney found that a “substantial portion” of Twitter’s users were fake back in 2016 when the entertainment giant was mulling over acquiring the platform, the company’s former CEO Bob Iger said on Wednesday.

Speaking to an audience at the Code Conference at Beverly Hills, California, Iger said that the boards of Disney and Twitter were prepared to enter negotiations when he backed off from the deal. He said that the company had discovered with Twitter’s help that a portion of – “not a majority” – of the microblogging site’s users were fake. 

As a result, Iger said he remembered “discounting the value” of Twitter. As part of his memoir, “The Ride of a Lifetime,” he laid out that his second thoughts about a Twitter deal stemmed from the “nastiness” that often emerged as par of discourse on the social media platform. Iger feared that Twitter would become a distraction for Disney. 

At Code Conference, despite not mentioning Elon Musk by name Iger said that because of his reading the news these days, “we [Disney] did look very carefully at all of the Twitter users,” before saying that a “substantial portion” of Twitter users “were not real.”

Iger’s comments come just over a month before Twitter and Elon Musk go to trial over the latter’s termination of a $44 billion buyout of the microblogging company. For his part, Musk has claimed that Twitter did not adequately represent the number of spam and bot accounts on its platform as his reason for pulling out of the deal. 

In late Augut this year, Peiter Zatko, Twitter’s former head of security, filed a complaint with American regulators alleging that Twitter had misled them about the state of security. In addition, he claimed that Twitter had “extreme, egregious deficiencies” in their handling of spam and bot accounts. Soon after these allegations went public, Zatko was summoned by various committees in Congress and even received a subpoena from Musk. 

Since it began, the legal battle between Twitter and Musk has been becoming increasingly acrimonious as both sides fight to gain leverage in their upcoming trial slated for October 17.