Texas AG launches investigation against Twitter for allegedly misreporting fake bot accounts

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Monday launched an investigation against Twitter, claiming that the company has underreported its fake bot accounts and those numbers have negatively impacted consumers and businesses. Paxton’s office said "bots," or spam accounts, "inflate followers and reach, and often push deceptive and annoying activity." "A large number of bot accounts not reduces users’ experience on the platform, but may also inflate the value of the company and the costs of doing business with it, thus directly harming consumers and businesses – specifically, Texas consumers and businesses," Paxton’s office said in a statement shared with FOX Business.

The issue of Twitter bots has come to the fore in recent days after Tesla CEO Elon Musk accused the social media giant of "actively resisting and thwarting" his information rights by failing to provide calculations supporting the social media platform’s internal estimate on spam and fake accounts. In April, Twitter accepted Musk’s $44 billion offer to acquire and take it private at $54.20 per share. But Musk has since said the deal is temporarily on hold pending details supporting Twitter’s calculations that spam and fake accounts make up less than 5% of users. Last month, Musk said his team would conduct its own random sampling to calculate the number of spam and fake accounts. Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal said an external review to determine the percentage would be difficult given the "critical need to use both public and private information."