Posted on 05/17/2022 11:15:43 PM PDT by McGruff
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has suggested that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission should investigate whether Twitter's internal estimate that spam and fake accounts make up less than 5% of users on the social media platform is accurate.
The call to action comes after Musk issued a poll to his more than 97 million Twitter followers asking whether they believe that more than 95% of Twitter users are real.
Representatives for the SEC and Twitter declined to comment.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxbusiness.com ...
He’s next.
Investors could/should sue Twitter for fraud.
Correct. If they committed fraud they are liable civilly and criminally.
Failing to report or falsifying required and material information at the least could result in civil fines and at the extreme could be criminal fraud. If Musk is correct re. the accuracy of claims by Twitter of the number of Bot users then the stock price is going to crash. If Twitter stiffs Musk and refuses to back up their claim with verifiable data then their stock price crashes.
Musk has the Twitter senior management and board of directors in a vise and the screw is tightening. My opinions.
Twitter was trading around $30 when Covid started.
Twitter rode the Stay-At-Home spike up to $80.
In 2021, price sanity returned, and Twitter was on a clear trajectory right back to $30 - or lower.
If Musk had been patient, he could have bought the whole company for $35 a share.
I think that it makes as much sense as investigating Trump on “inflating” his values of properties ...
Except that the NY AG decided to go after Trump for electioneering.
I’m sure they are watching this closely—Twitter now on the hotseat—and this could affect all of these companies that claim counts of users, even certain types of users, and we—their customers and the public are forced to accept as accurate. I’ve spent over half a million dollars in past on Google advertising, which was based on this data (and maybe fraud or extortion?). My business is now closed and on the other side of a bankruptcy but it does remind me of concerns I had and costs vs results.
Because Twitter claimed a very low percentage of fake accounts in their own filings with the SEC
It is to his offer to purchase
Check and mate
For what?
The Twitter CEO has now admitted they can’t actually disclose the percentage of fake accounts they have.
That admission itself goes to the heart of the fraud of their operation.
Twitter is heading toward worthlessness.
Their ugliest secret is the direct involvement of the CIA in their propaganda operation.
BTTT
I haven’t been following. How has it been shown they are a tool of the CIA?
If there is inaccuracy in Twitter disclosures, I suspect the deal is subject to re-negotiation.
I think the real issue is, was Twitter taken away from Jack Dorsey by USG agencies? When you read the list of “board members”, each with little or no equity and many with foreign names, you have to wonder, who is really in charge?
Maybe the “private companies” doing all the censorship and narrative creation aren’t so private after all.
To trade public stock, you have to turn in yearly statements. SEC then approves you moving forward (sorta saying you are legit).
If you were lying on the number of accounts, and your chief method of income is advertising based on true/fake accounts...that won’t be validated. The CEO/Board would then be brought in and dished out punishment (fines most likely).
But here’s the big jest to this...if you were not making any profit (paying zero dividends like they were for a dozen years), and all incoming cash went to salary structure, your advertisers went shake a fist and demand compensation back.
Example: you bought ads relating to followers of Joe Biden, but learn today that half of them are bots. So you might want half you money back for the past two years.
SEC is in a rough position here. If they pretend there’s nothing and Elon buys the company...learning 20-percent of the accounts are fake, then the SEC will be dragged in and probably sued as a ‘partner’ to the board/CEO.
Stock-holders are also in the mix....they might sue the CEO/board as well.
“Twitter to tell it how many accounts it has? What law is that?”
Start with “Truth in Advertising” Titter sells its product as better than it is.
This is fraud. It is like General Motors inflating sales numbers to affect the stock price.
This is from the SEC website:
“We continue to innovate in response to evolving markets and inspire the full confidence of the investing public and market participants alike.
And we continue to focus on the interests of long-term Main Street investors who are entrusting their hard-earned savings to our securities markets to fund home purchases, college educations, and other important life events.”
I’d say, off hand, that Musk is an investor with an accepted offer on the table asking for proof of Twitters actual customer-use base against a spam/bot use rate which Twitter doesn’t want to validate. Further, it’s not just Musk who is affected; the other Twitter investors have invested their ‘hard-earn savings’ also.
[”Main Street” is what they call part of their “Making Wall Street work for Main Street” meme]
As far as I have been able to figure out, Twitter has been HEFTILY padding the number of actual accounts.
When they permanently suspend — NOT delete — a user, that account could still show up in the numbers Twitter shows off to prospective advertisers. “Re-tread” users report that, having created another Twitter account, they could see their old account still sitting idle.
When Twitter suspends ‘bot accounts — same deal.
Obviously Twitter knows this, and they are intentionally leaving them online as “zombies.” Unless their SEC filings AND the promotional materials they use with prospective advertisers specifically omit these zombie accounts, the SEC may have cause for punitive action, and their advertisers may have a fairly strong fraud case brewing.
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