Twitter CEO Said to Term Whistleblower Claims ‘Inaccurate’; Firm Reiterates Spam User Count to SEC: Reports

Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal reportedly told the company’s employees at an internal meeting that the accusations by a former employee and whistleblower were inaccurate. The company was rocked by allegations of poor security against spam accounts and hackers on Tuesday, levelled by its former chief of security. Twitter is also preparing to engage in a legal tussle with Tesla CEO Elon Musk over the latter’s takeover bid for the microblogging service. The company also defended its spam and bot account enumeration to a US regulator, as per a report.    

According to a report by Reuters, based on audio from an internal meeting at Twitter, company CEO Parag Agrawal addressed employees at a meeting on Wednesday, stating that the claims made by whistleblower and former chief of security, Peiter ‘Mudge’ Zatko, were “foundationally, technically and historically inaccurate.”

 The Twitter CEO also told employees that the company would have to “narrow its focus” to fewer things, to be proportionate to the number of people at the company, according to the report, which states that attrition at the company is currently at 18.3 percent. 

Ahead of the company’s upcoming legal battle with Elon Musk, who has claimed that Twitter has misrepresented the amount of bot and spam users on its platform, the service also told the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on June 22, that it had only 5 percent of users that were spam accounts, according to another report based on a regulatory filing. 

The US SEC had reportedly asked the microblogging service for details on its methodology to calculate the percentage of these users in June. 

Elon Musk has alleged that Twitter misrepresented the number of spam and bot accounts on its platform, as he tries to extricate himself from his $44 billion (roughly Rs. 3,51,000 crore) takeover bid for the platform. Musk and Twitter are set to face off in in a court battle in October, which will decide whether the Tesla CEO must complete the terms of the deal to acquire Twitter.