Elon Musk has said his deal to buy Twitter has been put on hold as he attempts to find out more information over spam and fake accounts on the platform.
Back in April, the Tesla CEO clinched a deal to buy Twitter TWTR.N for $44billion, which is around £35billion.
He had previously said the platform needs to be taken private to grow and become a platform for free speech.
Elon Musk
BRENDAN MCDERMID
Mr Musk previously said he will reinstate Donald Trump
ALY SONG
Speaking at a TED Talk in Vancouver when asked about his bid, Mr Musk said: "I think it's very important for there to be an inclusive arena for free speech."
But now Mr Musk has revealed that the deal is “temporarily on hold” while he finds out more information about spam accounts.
His comments come In a tweet, where he linked back to a story published by Reuters on May 2.
The story showed a quarterly report from Twitter that estimated fake or spam accounts made up around 5 percent of the platform’s “monetisable daily active users” in the first quarter of 2022.
Hitting back at those figures, Mr Musk, who has previously spoken out about cleaning up Twitter’s problem with “spam bots”, said: “Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5 percent of users.”
Mr Musk’s comments come just days after he said he would reverse a Twitter ban on former US President Donald Trump.
The decision to ban Trump from the social media platform was "morally wrong and flat-out stupid," Musk said.
He added: “I do think that it was not correct to ban Donald Trump.
"I think that was a mistake because it alienated a large part of the county, and did not ultimately result in Donald Trump not having a voice.”
President Trump's ban comes after the 50-year-old said the presence of "bots and trolls" is "diminishing the experience" for the website's many users.
He said: "We have to get rid of the bots, trolls and the scams, that's obviously diminishing the user experience.
"We don't want people getting tricked out of their money, I'm definitely on the warpath.
"If somebody is operating a bot and troll on me, I'm definitely their enemy just to be clear."
