Texas attorney general probes Twitter after Musk’s bot complaints

Washington, June 6 (EFE).- Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is investigating Twitter over the number of bots, fake and spam accounts on the platform following public complaints by tycoon Elon Musk, who in April announced his deal to purchase the site for $44 billion.

“Attorney General Paxton issued a Civil Investigative Demand (CID) to investigate whether Twitter’s reporting on real versus fake users is ‘false, misleading, or deceptive’ under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act,” the Republican’s office said in a press release.

Paxton is demanding 23 types of documents, including data on the social network’s daily, monthly and monetizable active users, as well as the number of inauthentic Twitter accounts broken down by category (fake, spam, bot), for each month from 2017 to the present.

His investigation was launched the same day the Tesla CEO and SpaceX founder, through his lawyers, threatened to back out of the deal to buy Twitter over concerns about inauthentic accounts.

Marc Fagel, a securities law expert who previously served as the regional director of the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) office in San Francisco, told CNBC that Paxton’s announcement is unusual because such matters are not usually handled at state level.

In 2020, the world’s richest man moved his residence to Texas. Last year, Musk moved Tesla’s headquarters to Austin from California, and this year he also opened a large Tesla factory outside of Austin.

SpaceX also has a major manufacturing and launch facility in Brownsville, Texas. EFE

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