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Musk Says Twitter Committed Fraud in Dispute Over Fake Accounts

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Twitter has accused Elon Musk, in a lawsuit, of abandoning his planned acquisition of the company because stock market turbulence made the deal more difficult for him. But firing back in a legal filing, Mr. Musk says it was Twitter that torpedoed the $44 billion acquisition.

Mr. Musk argues that Twitter concealed the true number of inauthentic accounts on its platform, accusing the company of fraud. Such accounts made up at least 10 percent of Twitter’s daily active users who see ads, Mr. Musk’s legal team asserted, reiterating worries that he expressed shortly after signing the deal in April. Twitter has maintained that the figure is less than 5 percent.

Twitter also hid the number of its users who see ads, lawyers for Mr. Musk said in the filing, which was made public on Thursday. During the first quarter of the year, 65 million of the company’s 229 million daily active users did not see ads, according to the filing.

Twitter said that Mr. Musk was trying “to distort data received from Twitter to sponsor wild conclusions” and that its figures were accurate.

Using Botometer, a tool designed by Indiana University to measure inauthentic accounts, analysts for Mr. Musk found higher numbers of inauthentic accounts than Twitter had disclosed, according to the filing. Their analysis was preliminary and will be expanded, the filing said.

The misrepresentations hid weaknesses in Twitter’s business model and tricked Mr. Musk into agreeing to buy Twitter at “an inflated price,” lawyers for the Tesla executive said.

“Twitter was miscounting the number of false and spam accounts on its platform, as part of its scheme to mislead investors about the company’s prospects,” lawyers for Mr. Musk wrote. “Twitter’s disclosures have slowly unraveled, with Twitter frantically closing the gates on information in a desperate bid to prevent the Musk parties from uncovering its fraud.”

The filing, made last Friday but kept confidential until Thursday, was Mr. Musk’s first extensive response in what is expected to be a prolonged legal battle between the social media company and one of the richest people in the world. A trial is set for October.

“His claims are factually inaccurate, legally insufficient and commercially irrelevant,” Bret Taylor, the chairman of Twitter’s board, said in a statement on Thursday. The company also responded to Mr. Musk’s claims in a legal filing.

The Botometer tool is unreliable, Twitter said in its filing. The company noted that the tool used different standards from Twitter’s internal calculations and had once deemed Mr. Musk’s Twitter account “highly likely to be a bot.”

Mr. Musk began snapping up shares of Twitter early this year and by April had become the company’s largest shareholder. He rejected Twitter’s offer to join its board, instead launching a swift and aggressive takeover attempt. But once Twitter agreed to the acquisition, Mr. Musk began to express doubts. In July, he indicated that he no longer wanted to buy the company.

Twitter sued Mr. Musk in Delaware Chancery Court in an attempt to force the acquisition through. Twitter has claimed he lost interest in the deal as the market slumped and shares in Twitter and the electric carmaker Tesla, which is the primary source of Mr. Musk’s wealth, declined.

“Musk refuses to honor his obligations to Twitter and its stockholders because the deal he signed no longer serves his personal interests,” Twitter said in its lawsuit.

Over the last few days, the company peppered Mr. Musk’s banks, financial partners and associates with subpoenas, demanding communications about the deal that could shed light on why Mr. Musk decided to walk away.

The deal includes a “specific performance” clause that allows Twitter to sue to force the deal through so long as the debt that the billionaire has corralled for the acquisition is in place. But Mr. Musk may pay a $1 billion fee to exit the deal if his funding falls through.

Mr. Musk has maintained that Twitter is flooded with fake accounts and that the company has misled him about the true number of impostors on its platform. Fake accounts are used to spread spam or manipulate Twitter’s service by falsely amplifying trends, and are often automated rather than run by real people.

Twitter earns the bulk of its revenue from advertising. But Mr. Musk asserted that advertisers would not reach the customers they intended if Twitter was flooded with fake accounts. His lawyers argued that inaccuracies in Twitter’s user metrics amounted to a material adverse affect on the business, allowing him to abandon the acquisition.

Twitter said in a message to employees that was seen by The New York Times that it had chosen not to redact any of Mr. Musk’s claims because it was confident in its metrics. “We offer our customers a highly sophisticated set of tools and features to run and measure the effectiveness of their campaigns across our platform, with a foundation of transparency,” said Sean Edgett, Twitter’s general counsel.

On Thursday, Mr. Musk continued to weigh in on how Twitter could change. “I do understand the product quite well, so I think I’ve got a good sense of where to point the engineering team at Twitter to make it radically better,” he said during a meeting of Tesla shareholders.

Mike Isaac and Jack Ewing contributed reporting.

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ElonJet is (sort of) back on Twitter

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The college student who ran the now-banned @ElonJet Twitter account that used public information to track Elon Musk’s private jet has resumed his activities on Twitter under a new username. As noted by Insider, Jack Sweeney, 20, has created a new account called @ElonJetNextDay — which now tracks Musk’s private jet with a 24-hour delay to circumvent Twitter policy restrictions.

Sweeney’s original ElonJet account was suspended from the platform last week following accusations from Musk that it violated Twitter rules by revealing his live location. Twitter updated its policy to forbid publishing a person’s real-time location on the same day it suspended ElonJet. Sweeney said in an interview with Insider that he will be “posting manually” for now while he works on the framework to fully automate the account.

Musk tweeted on December 15th that “Posting locations someone traveled to on a slightly delayed basis isn’t a safety problem, so is ok.” Twitter also explicitly states that “sharing publicly available location information after a reasonable time has elapsed, so that the individual is no longer at risk for physical harm” is not a violation of platform rules. Elsewhere in the policy, it notes that its definition of “live” location data means someone’s real-time or same-day whereabouts.

Most commercial and private aircraft are equipped with Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast technology (ADS-B) that transmits a unique code (tied to the airplane’s tail number) containing information such as altitude and GPS location. This information is publicly available and aircraft flying in the USA and Europe are required to broadcast it in order to prevent midair collisions.

In a statement back in November, Musk said he would not ban the original ElonJet account as part of his “commitment to free speech” despite claiming it was a “direct personal safety risk.” The automated ElonJet account posted publicly available information regarding the location of Musk’s 2015 Gulfstream G650ER, and had amassed over 540,000 followers before it was permanently banned on December 14th. Musk previously offered Sweeney $5,000 to have the account taken down.



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She Worked for Twitter. Then She Tweeted at Elon Musk.

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Early in November, Twitter’s roughly 7,500 employees received a terse email from a generic address: “In an effort to place Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our global work force.” The note was signed “Twitter.” On Nov. 3, some people at the company received emails indicating they would be laid off the next day.

That night, Ms. Solomon, her husband and a few colleagues headed to Dots Cafe Portland, a lounge on Clinton Street. Phones were on the table, face up, she said. As the work friends talked, they tapped away at their phones, taking part in chats on the Signal app with colleagues in London, Seattle and San Francisco. Messages like “I got hit” were flying across screens, Ms. Solomon recalled. “You were seeing your co-workers drop like flies,” she said.

By the next afternoon her team of about 10 engineers was reduced to four. Ms. Solomon and her husband had survived the round of layoffs. The next week, she recalled, she awaited further direction from Mr. Musk or the new executive team. Nothing came, she said, except for an email alerting employees that remote work would no longer be permitted, with few exceptions.

Many employees learned of Mr. Musk’s priorities by watching his Twitter feed, where he posted frequently about company business to his more than 100 million followers. On Nov. 5, he complained about the platform’s search function: “Search within Twitter reminds me of Infoseek in ’98! That will also get a lot better pronto,” he wrote. That same day, he tweeted: “Twitter will soon add ability to attach long-form text to tweets, ending absurdity of notepad screenshots.”

That was more than Ms. Solomon and many of her colleagues had heard internally. “Radio silence,” she said. She began to vent her frustration on Twitter.

One of her first tweets in this vein came on Nov. 6, shortly after Mr. Musk announced a new rule for Twitter users in a tweet: “Any name change at all will cause temporary loss of verified checkmark,” he wrote. He had posted that message after many people on Twitter had changed their names to variations on Mr. Musk’s name, most of them mocking.



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The new iOS 16.2 Home app architecture upgrade has disappeared

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Apple has removed the option to upgrade to the new HomeKit architecture on devices running iOS 16.2. The change follows multiple reports of issues and problems with the Home app after the upgrade was installed.

Apple spokesperson Emily Ewing confirmed the change in a statement provided to The Verge:

“We are aware of an issue that may impact the ability for users to share the Home within the Home app. A fix will be available soon. In the meantime, we’ve temporarily removed the option to upgrade to the new Home architecture. Users who have already upgraded will not be impacted.“

The new Home app architecture was one of the key features of iOS 16.2, with Apple claiming that the upgrade would be “more reliable and efficient.” MacRumors first discovered this week that the Home app in iOS 16.2 no longer offers the option to upgrade to the new architecture within the Home app settings. Several reporters at The Verge have also confirmed that the upgrade option is unavailable on their devices.

The new architecture was first introduced in the iOS 16.2 beta back in October as an optional upgrade before the iOS 16.2 public release on December 13th. Both the beta and public release required Apple devices logged into iCloud to be running the latest versions of iOS, macOS, and tvOS. The upgrade does not happen automatically when iOS 16.2 is installed on a phone, instead requiring a manual process through the Home app.

The update has caused issues with missing devices and adding multiple users for some

Reddit users who downloaded the optional upgrade prior to its removal have reported issues such as the app booting other members from a Home account and being unable to re-add them. Users on the MacRumors forum have reported being unable to invite users to share the Home, HomeKit‌ devices being stuck displaying an “updating” status, and some accessories vanishing from the Home app entirely. Users who have already upgraded are unable to revert to the previous version of the app.

Update, December 23rd, 2022, 2:15PM ET: Added confirmation and statement from Apple spokesperson. Added links to Apple’s updated support pages.

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