Twitter Shareholders To Vote On Sale To Elon Musk By August

The management of Twitter Inc. plans to hold a shareholder vote on the $44 billion dollar sale of the company to Elon Musk by early August.

In an employee meeting, Twitter’s legal head, Vijaya Gadde, said that the company anticipates that it would hold a shareholder meeting on the sale in late July or early August, reports Reuters.

The company’s executives also revealed, in an internal meeting, that Twitter was working to improve its defenses against fake accounts and accounts that spread cryptocurrency spam.

This is perceived to be in response to Musk’s direct threat that he would walk away from the deal entirely if Twitter did not provide him with proof that fake accounts (or spam bots) on the platform account for less than 5% of its active users.

The company has finally begun plans to comply with Elon Musk’s demand by giving him access to the information he wants. Part of that is a “firehose” which is a set of all tweets on the platform analyzed by different parameters, such as devices of users or profiles of accounts that publish tweets.

Twitter usually sells this data to social media monitoring companies as part of its licensing business but plans to make it available to Musk for free as part of the information exchange. The firehose does not contain confidential information, or personal details of Twitter users that are not public.

Back in May, when Musk first requested for proof on how to ascertain the actual number of fake accounts on the platform, Twitter CEO, Parag Agrawal responded to him in a lengthy thread explaining that spam accounts on the platform are well under 5% and that more than 500,000 accounts are suspended in a day for suspicions of being fake accounts.

He added that it was impossible to reproduce Twitter’s estimate externally due to the use of private data.

“Unfortunately, we don’t believe that this specific estimation can be performed externally, given the critical need to use both public and private information (which we can’t share). Externally, it’s not even possible to know which accounts are counted as mDAUs on any given day.

“The use of private data is particularly important to avoid misclassifying users who are actually real. FirstnameBunchOfNumbers with no profile pic and odd tweets might seem like a bot or spam to you, but behind the scenes, we often see multiple indicators that it’s a real person,” he said.