Peiter Zatko, who served as Twitter’s security chief until he was fired early this year, filed the whistleblower complaints last month with the SEC, the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice. The letter was disclosed in a filing posted by the SEC on Wednesday, a day after Twitter’s former head of security alleged that the company misled regulators about its poor cybersecurity defenses and its negligence in attempting to root out fake accounts that spread disinformation.
Neither the SEC nor Twitter would comment Wednesday. Such questions can be routine, and it wasn’t clear whether the SEC has opened a formal investigation into Twitter’s fake accounts. Musk has claimed that Twitter is undercounting the number of fake accounts, which inflates the number of real users. The SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance asked the questions in a June 15 letter, shortly before Tesla CEO Elon Musk raised the issue as grounds to back out of a deal to buy Twitter for $44 billion. The SEC would be interested in both figures because Twitter uses them to attract advertisers, whose payments make up a little more than 90% of the company’s revenue. Twitter says it has 238 million active monthly users, and that about 5% of the accounts it sells ads against are fake, either spam or bots. The Securities and Exchange Commission in June asked the company about its methodology for calculating false or spam accounts and “the underlying judgments and assumptions used by management.” securities regulators are questioning Twitter about the way it determines how many fake accounts are on its platform.
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