Elon Musk accuses Twitter algorithm of manipulation as U-turn speculation mounts

pcgamer.com:

One of the year's biggest tech stories so far is the proposed acquisition of Twitter by one Elon Musk in a deal that could be worth about $44 billion. Since then the action has been more-or-less non-stop: a handful of Twitter executives were ousted, Musk last week announced the deal was «temporarily on hold» thanks to bots, and now… well, it looks like Musk is trying to deliberately wind-up Twitter.

There's been some speculation, given Musk's behaviour since the deal was announced, that he may have had second thoughts and be looking for a face-saving way to back out of the deal. The delay to focus on bots and question Twitter's public filings may well be of genuine concern, but the way Musk is going about things is, as ever, designed to provoke reaction—at the weekend, he announced that his team would be doing random sampling of Twitter users to come up with their own estimates of how many are bots.

To find out, my team will do a random sample of 100 followers of @twitter. I invite others to repeat the same process and see what they discover …May 14, 2022

The problem? Musk went on to give further detail in a reply to another user, writing: «Any sensible random sampling process is fine. If many people independently get similar results for % of fake/spam/duplicate accounts, that will be telling. I picked 100 as the sample size number, because that is what Twitter uses to calculate <5% fake/spam/duplicate.»

Shortly afterwards, with a degree of faux-incredulity, Musk revealed that Twitter's legal department called and complained that he had violated an NDA by revealing Twitter's sample size number.

Twitter legal just called to complain that I violated their NDA by revealing the bot check sample size is 100!This actually