Elon Musk Accused Of Violating Privacy Agreement With Twitter Over Sample Bot

Elon Musk is accused of breaching a secret deal with Twitter. (photo: twitter @jokowi)

JAKARTA - Elon Musk on Saturday, May 14 tweeted that Twitter Inc's legal team accused him of violating a confidentiality agreement by disclosing that the sample size for social media platform checks on automated users was 100.

"Twitter Legal's team just called to complain that I violated their NDA by revealing the bot check sample size was 100!" tweeted Musk, chief executive of electric car maker Tesla Inc (TSLA.O).

Musk on Friday, May 13 tweeted that a $44 billion (IDR 636.6 trillion) cash deal to make the company private was "temporarily on hold" while he awaited data on the proportion of fake accounts on Twitter.

He said his team would test a "random sample of 100 followers" on Twitter to identify bots. Here's his response to a question that sparked Twitter's accusations.

When one user asked Musk to "describe the bot account filtering process," he replied: "I chose 100 as the sample size number, because that's what Twitter uses to calculate <5% fake/spam/duplicates."

Musk tweeted in the early hours of Sunday, May 15 that he had not seen “any” analysis showing that social media companies had fewer than 5% fake accounts. He went on to say that "There is likely to be more than 90% of daily active users."