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Elon Musk accuses Twitter of rushing its lawsuit along at 'warp speed'

9 points by mardiyah 4y ago

powerbroker 4y ago
From the guy who thinks 'next year' is when our cars will be driving themselves. Next up, "Next year, I'm buying Twitter", or "taking Tesla private... next year". The more he talks about this, the more his reputation suffers.
vba616 4y ago
Here's a telling bit: "Musk tweeted about their process, which he said involves a random sample of only 100 accounts per day. "That's it. No automation, no AI, no machine learning," the filing said." The sampling process he's talking about is a reality check on all that stuff so of course it's done manually. First Twitter uses every tool they have to identify fake/spam accounts, probably including "machine learning", certainly including automation...and then they do a manual sample to see approximately what proportion they missed. Can't imagine how else they could do it. But I would like to know what his strategy is. How does playing at being a demagogue help him in court?
- vba616 4y ago
  I just skimmed EM's response in the lawsuit. It sounds as though his entire strategy is a "Gish Gallop" of incoherent claims about the mDAUs and a consequent demand for massive discovery that will take forever. I don't see any question that the expectation is to confuse people in court about definitions, the same way random EM fans have been misled. Ever single point made was based on a misunderstanding or misrepresentation, until I quit reading in horror. It's kind of terrifying when I imagine it might work. Even if it doesn't, I can't imagine that his lawyers will be punished or disbarred for this, which is almost as terrifying.
vba616 4y ago
The article propagates a key element of the EM PR campaign which I think is at odds with reality: "Weeks later, Musk said the deal was "on hold" while he looked into Twitter's claim that spam or bots make up less than 5% of its user accounts." Twitter has made a completely different claim, which is in SEC filings. They claim that about 5% of the accounts determined to be real were misclassified, from random sampling and manual examination.

9 points by mardiyah 4y ago

From the guy who thinks 'next year' is when our cars will be driving themselves. Next up, "Next year, I'm buying Twitter", or "taking Tesla private... next year". The more he talks about this, the more his reputation suffers.

vba616 4y ago

Here's a telling bit: "Musk tweeted about their process, which he said involves a random sample of only 100 accounts per day. "That's it. No automation, no AI, no machine learning," the filing said." The sampling process he's talking about is a reality check on all that stuff so of course it's done manually. First Twitter uses every tool they have to identify fake/spam accounts, probably including "machine learning", certainly including automation...and then they do a manual sample to see approximately what proportion they missed. Can't imagine how else they could do it. But I would like to know what his strategy is. How does playing at being a demagogue help him in court?

vba616 4y ago
I just skimmed EM's response in the lawsuit. It sounds as though his entire strategy is a "Gish Gallop" of incoherent claims about the mDAUs and a consequent demand for massive discovery that will take forever. I don't see any question that the expectation is to confuse people in court about definitions, the same way random EM fans have been misled. Ever single point made was based on a misunderstanding or misrepresentation, until I quit reading in horror. It's kind of terrifying when I imagine it might work. Even if it doesn't, I can't imagine that his lawyers will be punished or disbarred for this, which is almost as terrifying.

vba616 4y ago

The article propagates a key element of the EM PR campaign which I think is at odds with reality: "Weeks later, Musk said the deal was "on hold" while he looked into Twitter's claim that spam or bots make up less than 5% of its user accounts." Twitter has made a completely different claim, which is in SEC filings. They claim that about 5% of the accounts determined to be real were misclassified, from random sampling and manual examination.