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.
The problem is this analogy doesn’t hold. The value of real estate is going to have a subjective component because a lot of the value of property is tied up in the goodwill. Real Estate developers will always estimate the value of their holdings highly. Banks will always do their own estimate of the value of real estate used as collateral and will never rely on the estimates of the developer/borrower. Letitia James’ case against Trump was ridiculous from the start. If it had stuck, you’d have to prosecute everybody in the real estate industry.
Twitter - if the fake bots are significantly more than 5% - has been defrauding advertisers and investors and they have been filing false financial statements with the SEC. There’s no question that’s fraud. That’s actually provable unlike a developer’s estimate as to the value of the location or the brand name of his property.....which nobody really relies on from the start.
No. It makes no sense to investigate Trump for supposedly inflating his property value because his assessment of his value is irrelevant. The bank uses it’s own valuation agents in determining the value for loan if the buildings are collateral.
On the other hand a business misrepresenting a crucial detail about # of true users is fraud and likely criminal since the number of users is a key datum used by investors & advertisers to determine the stock/advertising value based only on the company’s representation.
The SEC recognizes that the market would fall apart if companies were not policed re honest reporting on their companies financials & relevant data. That is why SEC fines and cites companies for inaccurate info. Purposely misrepresenting for gain is fraud and leaves Twitter open to suit & perhaps criminal proceedings.