Althouse: "After a weeks-long impasse, Twitter’s board plans to comply with Elon Musk’s demands for internal data by offering access to its full 'firehose,' the massive stream of data..."

June 8, 2022

"After a weeks-long impasse, Twitter’s board plans to comply with Elon Musk’s demands for internal data by offering access to its full 'firehose,' the massive stream of data..."

"... comprising more than 500 million tweets posted each day, according to a person familiar with the company’s thinking, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the state of negotiations."

WaPo reports.

40 comments:

WisRich said...: The old "bury them in paper" legal trick.; 6/8/22, 2:47 PM
rhhardin said...: Points for using "comprise" correctly.; 6/8/22, 3:02 PM
typingtalker said...: Without keeping an exact score I believe that Elon Musk wins more than he loses despite what the popular press, business press and technology press put in their play-by-play headlines. And using the only score that counts ... Musk is continuing to do quite well financially.; 6/8/22, 3:02 PM
Mike Sylwester said...: Of course, the "massive stream of data" will not include any tweets from Babylon Bee or any tweets about Hunter Biden's laptops.; 6/8/22, 3:06 PM
Buckwheathikes said...: Ah, this is actually cool, Ann. As a law professor, who taught other people how to be lawyers, can you tell us what this legal maneuver known as "firehosing" means?

If I'm correct, what it means is you douse your opponent's lawyers in so much information that they cannot possibly process it in a given amount of time (usually before a scheduled trial) on the hopes that they cannot find the needle you hid in that haystack until it's too late ... but at the same time, you can't be held liable for "withholding" evidence.

Also ... can you tell us about how ethical the people you trained are?; 6/8/22, 3:08 PM
rhhardin said...: Unlike unfriendly document dumps, you can process the tweets with a computer; just get a talented programmer and you've got what you want.; 6/8/22, 3:12 PM
Michael K said...: Sounds like they have had time to clean out the bot accounts.; 6/8/22, 3:19 PM
Drago said...: "After a weeks-long impasse, Twitter’s board plans to comply with Elon Musk’s demands for internal data by offering access to its full 'firehose,' the massive stream of data... comprising more than 500 million tweets posted each day, according to a person familiar with the company’s thinking, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the state of negotiations."

Twitter's Board has overruled their moron lefty CEO and general counsel because they know Musk will still pay a premium over actual value, regardless of how much lying re: fake accounts the Twitterati have been peddling.

Which is no doubt a lot.; 6/8/22, 3:31 PM
madAsHell said...: Hold muh beer!! Watch me grep.; 6/8/22, 3:38 PM
n.n said...: The analogy of manufacturing users is to hiding inventory. Twitter me this, I wonder if data blocs will be sufficient to demonstrate human participation, let alone interest, which is presumed to relate to commercial viability.; 6/8/22, 3:42 PM
Left Bank of the Charles said...: In terms of the Wall Street game being played here, Elon wants out the price he agreed to, and the Twitter board wants to plausibly pin the collapse of the deal on him rather than them. If the deal was contingent on his analysis of data that Twitter would give him, that’s an odd contingency for a board to give a hostile bidder.; 6/8/22, 3:53 PM
Tomcc said...: It certainly seems that the board doesn't wish to answer the question. First, they give too little information, then they give the "firehose". The game is afoot!; 6/8/22, 3:56 PM
mikee said...: So Twitter, rather than complying with requests for specific information, is attempting to deny that info to Musk by burying it under a gigantic pile of garbage. Given in a completely unusable format, with extraneous information attached that buries the desired data, this is Twitter saying "We have something to hide and hope you don't find it."; 6/8/22, 4:14 PM
Readering said...: Now he will be able to hit the ground running when the acquisition closes.; 6/8/22, 4:16 PM
Lem the artificially intelligent said...: Now, wait a minute. We need to contextualize what happened here.

The board wanted to give personalities that may appear polarizing a chance to prove they're willing to uphold twitter's free speech values... or something.; 6/8/22, 4:49 PM
David-2 said...: I bet they're thinking that that stream of 500M tweets/day would be unusable for anyone but them, that they're they only ones that can actually deal with that volume, do correlations, and extract any kind of signal from that data.

They'll be surprised!

You don't successfully launch a rocket, deploy dozens of satellites, and land the booster safely without collecting and handling extremely large amounts of telemetry - much of it in real time. And that's just Musk's in-house expertise. His financial backers will help him with engineers who are used to extracting meaningful data out of vast noisy data streams - that's what propels fintech. And there are plenty of other experienced engineers he could easily afford to get to work with that data lake.

I can wait to see what he turns up.; 6/8/22, 4:49 PM
David-2 said...: I bet they're thinking that that stream of 500M tweets/day would be unusable for anyone but them, that they're they only ones that can actually deal with that volume, do correlations, and extract any kind of signal from that data.

They'll be surprised!

You don't successfully launch a rocket, deploy dozens of satellites, and land the booster safely without collecting and handling extremely large amounts of telemetry - much of it in real time. And that's just Musk's in-house expertise. His financial backers will help him with engineers who are used to extracting meaningful data out of vast noisy data streams - that's what propels fintech. And there are plenty of other experienced engineers he could easily afford to get to work with that data lake.

I can wait to see what he turns up.; 6/8/22, 4:50 PM
cubanbob said...: Musk is now looking to substantially discount the offer and possibly sue for fraud on the shares he already owns.; 6/8/22, 5:00 PM
Maynard said...: Musk believes that about 20% of Twitter accounts are phonies.

Twitter estimated that number to be 5%. I wonder if they doctored the data they are providing Musk to make that number closer to 5%. I also wonder if Musk has algorithms to determine the validity of the data.

Things are just getting interesting.; 6/8/22, 5:04 PM
Quaestor said...: A company that's barely profitable has fewer and dumber attorneys than Musk has to fix his parking tickets.; 6/8/22, 5:21 PM
Narayanan said...: Q: does Elon have software to crunch that amount of data?

A: SpaceX surely has equally/more complex data crunching needs for launching rockets and retrieving them?!

Maybe Elon will have work for people returning to office! for a while at least!; 6/8/22, 5:21 PM
Quaestor said...: And why is Twitter such a fiduciary shipwreck? One reason: Vijaya Gadde was paid $17 mil to warm an office chair with her South Asian kaboodle. And she's probably not alone among Twitter's corner office kommisars. The Big Blue Boid may have some of the most gaseous payroll accounts in history of double-entry bookkeeping, leeching dividends to the bare minimum. Of course, Twitter investors are an uncommon lot, most of whom are trust fund hobos who dress like lumberjacks but talk like valley girls, like fer sure, who don't know or care how much money they have, just so long as there's lots of it.; 6/8/22, 5:40 PM
The Vault Dweller said...: Looks like Elon finally garnered that information.; 6/8/22, 5:46 PM
Quaestor said...: madAsHell writes, "Hold muh beer!! Watch me grep."

Does anyone care to wager on how many user account metadata strings match "george*floyd"?

"che*guevara"?; 6/8/22, 5:47 PM
minnesota farm guy said...: Isn't amazing what you can get done when you state your goals succinctly and refuse to be put off by the BS!; 6/8/22, 6:38 PM
Josephbleau said...: Musk can easily analyze the purported "Fire Hose" by various forms of neural nets. They sell the "Fire Hose" to ad guys so it is regularly perused. What I would have wanted is the previous 6 mos "Fire Hose" to compare with the new "Fire Hose" now available.; 6/8/22, 6:51 PM
mezzrow said...: When you find the marble in the oatmeal, you get the prize!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXc5ltzKq3Y&ab_channel=kingryan01; 6/8/22, 7:24 PM
Butkus51 said...: Twitter went public Aug of 2014 at 40.65. Today it closed at 40.44

8 years of nothing in a bull market. Well done.; 6/8/22, 7:46 PM
Browndog said...: If Musk intended to buy twitter from day one, Musk will buy twitter.

The "Musk got schooled, out played, can't/won't" crowd know nothing.; 6/8/22, 8:21 PM
Narayanan said...: I am seeing elsewhere : Twitter currently sells the [data from] firehose stream to dozen companies.; 6/8/22, 8:43 PM
Mike (MJB Wolf) said...: I keep hearing Musk effed up but then Twitter is the one that blinks every time. You guys do know your lame attempts to cancel him creates the very myth-like scenario you claim his fanboys made up. It’s comedy gold Jerry!; 6/8/22, 8:46 PM
William said...: I'm rooting for Musk, but this is getting way too Byzantine for me to follow. I guess Musk wants out of the deal or a discounted price. I guess the Twitter board wants him to pay the premium or the billion dollar fee to walk away from the deal. Here's my guess: he walks away from the deal and pays less than a billion to do so... The Heard/Depp case was way more interesting. A big payday for the lawyers involved, but not a patch on what the legal fees here will be.; 6/8/22, 9:23 PM
Aggie said...: Given his direct hands-on experience programming PayPal, I have no doubt that Musk can draw together the expertise required to analyze the firehouse. I wouldn't guess that processing power in-house is going to be a limiting factor issue either.; 6/8/22, 10:12 PM
effinayright said...: Buckwheathikes said...
Ah, this is actually cool, Ann. As a law professor, who taught other people how to be lawyers, can you tell us what this legal maneuver known as "firehosing" means?

If I'm correct, what it means is you douse your opponent's lawyers in so much information that they cannot possibly process it in a given amount of time (usually before a scheduled trial) on the hopes that they cannot find the needle you hid in that haystack until it's too late ... but at the same time, you can't be held liable for "withholding" evidence.

Also ... can you tell us about how ethical the people you trained are?
*************

IIRC Ms. Althouse taught Con Law, not litigation tactics.; 6/9/22, 12:10 AM
Leland said...: I don’t think the request was for data but for the method they used to determine bots and convince other businesses that they are actually reaching X real people. Seems like Twitter has decided to say, “we don’t really know ourselves” which ought to be interesting to the SEC, except Twitter is part of the privileged left.; 6/9/22, 5:51 AM
Kevin said...: Shorter Twitter: we refuse to state for the record how many bots there really are, as it is not in our interest to do so.; 6/9/22, 6:34 AM
What's emanating from your penumbra said...: It's such a transparent ploy, and the board's fear of shareholder liability for making up the 5% bot statistic they published is so obvious, that virtually everyone understands what's going on here.; 6/9/22, 8:39 AM
cassandra lite said...: Next steps:

Musk uses the metrics to revise his offer, and pay less per share than what the stock is going for that day.

Which tanks the stock.

The board declines the offer.

Musk doesn't pursue the sale.

In three weeks, no one cares and we go back to the status quo, with people on the right complaining about Twitter censorship and people on the left treating it like reality. ... And the Twitters censors getting more aggressive on the orders of the CEO.; 6/9/22, 8:57 AM
Gravel said...: They really don't understand that they're throwing Musk in the briar patch.; 6/9/22, 5:09 PM
Lurker21 said...: He may be the richest man in the world, but I doubt he's got a full firehose down there.; 6/9/22, 6:17 PM