Twitter Grants Elon Musk Access to Firehose Data Amid Bot Dispute
Twitter plans to hand over its complete "firehose" data stream to Elon Musk as he seeks information about bot accounts on the platform. This move comes as the billionaire attempts to scrutinize the company's user base before finalizing his $44 billion acquisition.
Twitter is preparing to give Elon Musk access to its full "firehose," a comprehensive data stream containing information about every tweet sent on the platform. This decision comes after Musk's legal team demands more transparency regarding spam and fake accounts, a tactic that many see as a potential exit strategy from his $44 billion purchase agreement.
The firehose data includes details about tweets, the devices used to send them, and other account information that Twitter previously keeps private. Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal estimates that bots make up less than 5% of monetizable daily active users, but he states that external verification of this number is impossible without access to this internal data.
Under the terms of the acquisition contract, Musk is obligated to complete the purchase unless he proves that Twitter misrepresents its true value through deceptive bot statistics. While a new study from GlobalData suggests that at least 10% of Twitter users could be bots, at least two dozen outside companies already pay for firehose access, making any major hidden discrepancies in Twitter's public claims highly unlikely.