Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton says his office will open an investigation into the number of fake accounts on the platform.

His office issued a statement which said, “Attorney General Paxton issued a Civil Investigative Demand (CID) to investigate whether Twitter’s reporting on real versus fake users is ‘false, misleading, or deceptive’ under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act.”

Paxton is demanding 23 pieces of data from the company, including extensive details on daily, monthly, and monetizable active users, as well as, “documents sufficient to show the number of inauthentic Twitter Accounts for each month from 2017 to the present, broken down by category of inauthentic account (i.e., Fake Account, Spammer Account, and Bot Account) if available.” 

The new probe was begun on the same day Elon Musk made another threat to back out of his proposed acquisition deal for the social media network over the bot issue.

Marc Fagel, a securities law expert and former regional director of the San Francisco office of the SEC, said it is unusual for such an investigation to be run at the state level, and that such complicated investigations of such large companies are usually the province of the SEC.

Musk has moved much of his Tesla and SpaceX operations to Texas, as well as his residence.

A spokesperson for Twitter declined to comment.

Photo of Ken Paxton courtesy of Gage Skidmore via Wikipedia.