In the absence of little more than a month for Twitter and Elon Musk to face each other before Judge Kathaleen McCormick, in a trial that will last for five days sometime in October, we can assume that both parties are already working at full capacity to prepare their positions in the judicial confrontation, since each has much to gain if you impose your position against that of your rival.

But not only the two opposing parties have begun to do their homework, Judge McCormick is also fully immersed in the case. And, as we can read in CBS News, he has given orders to Twitter and Elon Musk to deliver more documentation on the epicenter of the problem, that is, the information that both parties handle in relation to the number of bots on the platform. Let us remember that this was estimated by Twitter at 5% of all accounts, while Elon Musk points out that the figure is actually higher and demands more information from the managers of the social network.

One would think that, when requesting this type of information, McCormick would appeal exclusively to Twitter, since it is the managers of the social network who have the necessary means and tools to carry out such inquiries, but this has not been the case. On the one hand, it has requested more data from the social network about the company’s estimates that less than 5% of the accounts on its platform are false, that is, the documentation of the processes carried out to draw such a conclusion.

But on the other hand, has also asked Elon Musk to provide documentation on the counter-tests carried out by his team and on which it claims to base itself to reach the conclusion that the volume of accounts is greater than the 5% cited by Twitter. And this is, let us not forget, a key element, since it is what Elon Musk relies on to justify his withdrawal from the purchase operation without having to pay any compensation for not fulfilling the commitment established between the parties at the signing of the purchase contract.

Musk claims Twitter hasn’t provided enough details about the number of fake accounts on its platform and argues that up to 30% of Twitter’s “monetizable daily active users” or mDAUs could be spam or bot accounts. Twitter says that the mDAU metric helps it measure the number of accounts on its platform that advertisers can target, thus making them “monetizable.”

Additionally, The judge has also rejected more extensive data requests made by Musk’s lawyers.which he has described as «absurdly widenoting that a literal reading of the request would require Twitter to produce “billions and trillions of data points” reflecting all the data collected on roughly 200 million accounts over three years. Instead, McCormick directed Twitter to produce information on 9,000 accounts that were reviewed in connection with the company’s fourth-quarter audit, a subset of data that has been described as a “historical snapshot.”