Let's assume Twitter and Musk are in deed playing this game here, then people and whether or not the data provided by Twitter is enough to detect bots is not the point. Whether or not the SEC, and courts at some point, see the shared data as sufficient for Twitter to fulfill transparency requirements is important.

Correct, for the legal part of the purchase.

But there is also a “public opinion” part, and that’s about politics. I have the impression that Tw is trying to at least remain in control until the upcoming elections.

Only that public opinion so doesn't matter when it comes to the legal aspects of this.

And this has nothing to do with elections whatsoever, just with a but hurt trying to buy Twitter out of spite.

It’s not about the legal outcome, it’s about freedom of expression that many seem to be willing to sacrifice on the altar of ideologically fuelled hate.

There is an incredible number of tweets being put out which are exact copies of each other - indicating that it is not actual human beings "manning" those accounts.

If Musk has a way of running analysis on the data to do the following: 1. Level of duplicates. 2. Source of duplicates (who posts it first) 3. How often do they do that? 4. What is the political slant of these tweets 5. Which part of the world are the people tweeting from

All of this alone will reveal very interesting information.. my guess is that it will prove that a lot of tweets are orchestrated.

Musk’s legal claim is incredibly flimsy.

The legal battle will not be about whether it is all the data. Musk isn’t owed that. It’s about whether twitter is sufficiently responding to requests.

Even without this the claim was very likely to fail. Hard to see it surviving this.

It’s not just the posts, it has device data in it too