Billionaire businessman Elon Musk says his buyout of Twitter is 'temporarily on hold'.
He says this is because of spam or fake accounts on the platform.
In a tweet on Friday, he said: "Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users".
Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of usershttps://t.co/Y2t0QMuuyn
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 13, 2022
Mr Musk added that he is "still committed to [the] acquisition".
The Tesla CEO last week secured $7bn (€6.7bn) from new investors for his $44bn (€42.3bn) takeover of the social media company.
Shares of the firm fell 20% in pre-market trading.
The world's richest man had said that if his acquisition went through one of his priorities would be to remove "spam bots" from the platform.
The company had earlier this month estimated that false or spam accounts represented fewer than 5% of its monetisable daily active users during the first quarter.
Mr Musk has repeatedly stated how he wants Twitter to become a platform for free speech and to reduce its reliance on advertising.
"Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated," Mr Musk said in a statement in April.
A photo illustration show the official profile of Elon Musk on the social network Twitter in April 2022. Picture by: SOPA Images Limited / Alamy Stock Photo"I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans."
He also said he would reverse the platform's ban on former US president Donald Trump.
And he has suggested adding new features - including an edit button and allowing longer tweets to be posted.
While there are concerns the sale could move far-right groups into more mainstream spaces.
That's according to Professor Jane Suiter, director of the DCU Institute for Media, Democracy and Society.
She told Newstalk last month: "I would be concerned that I would just see an awful lot more really unpleasant content that would actually just make my day more unpleasant.
"You'd have to use your Block button a lot more and so on.
"And then I'd be worried from a democratic point of view that it will really incentivise actors, who want to trigger people's negative emotions, to really incentivise the rise of the far-right, alt-right and the QAnon-type narratives that we see.
"At the moment in Ireland these are mostly on spaces like Telegram - I'd be worried that they'd come into more mainstream spaces".
Additional reporting: IRN
