Twitter Has a Major Bot Problem and Elon Musk Isn’t the Only One to Drop a Deal Over It

Townhall:

Elon Musk’s Twitter deal isn’t the only one that’s fallen apart over the social media giant’s bot issue. Former Disney CEO Bob Iger said the entertainment company walked away from a deal to purchase Twitter for the very same reason.

“We did look very carefully at all of the Twitter users…and we at that point estimated with some of Twitter’s help that a substantial portion — not a majority — were not real,” Iger said at Vox Media’s Code Conference in Los Angeles about the 2016 deal.

Iger had originally been interested in the acquisition because he saw Twitter as a “phenomenal” way to distribute Disney’s content globally.

“We were intent on going into the streaming business. We needed a technology solution,” he said, according to Vox’s Recode. “We have all this great IP. We weren’t a technology company. How do we get that IP to consumers around the world? … And we were kicking tires left and right. We thought about developing ourselves. Five years, $500 million. It wasn’t the money, it was the time, because the world was changing fast. And at the same time, we heard that Twitter was contemplating a sale. more