The trial judge, Kathleen McCormick denied the request for data from Elon Musk on the data of Twitter. Not only that: she called it “absurdly too large”. And she has instead decided to grant only partial access to the data relevant to the case. Like the data on bot and on “Active users that can be accounted for” (mDAU).
Judge rejects Elon Musk’s request for data on Twitter
Musk’s lawyers would have liked “all the Twitter data they can store on the about 200 million accounts included in the account of active accounting users (mDAU) for approximately three yearsin“. According to McCormick, who explains it in the court decision, this would be billions of data, too much for anyone.
Indeed, he explains that Twitter “has difficulty in quantifying the burden of responding to this request because no one who was not insane would embark on such an effort. Suffice it to say that the complainant has shown that this request is excessively burdensome ”.
However, Twitter will provide much more data to make the ruling fair. Among these, the data of the 9,000 accounts he viewed in the fourth quarter of 2021, to evaluate the number of bots on the platform and active users. This data will have to reach Elon Musk’s lawyers: Twitter explained that it will take two weeks to collect them.
They will also have to deliver the documents that talk about Musk and the bots. But the judge also partially accepted the requests of Twitter, which asked for the data of the analyzes made by Musk. “At the very least, the accused must produce the analyzes,” she writes.
Both sides will have to share relevant information before the October 17 trial begins, which will consider whether or not Musk can exempt himself from his $ 44 billion Twitter attempted purchase. We will keep you posted.