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By Jon Jackson
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Bob Iger, the former CEO of The Walt Disney Company, on Wednesday said Disney was close to buying Twitter in 2016 but backed off after allegedly learning the social media platform was full of "hate speech" and bots.
Iger's claims about Twitter are similar to those made by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who is trying to drop his $44 billion bid to buy the company based on what he said is a large presence of false accounts known as "bots." Twitter is suing Musk to compel him to complete his acquisition, and a trial is set to begin in October on the matter.
The revelations about Disney's supposed plans for Twitter were revealed while Iger spoke at Vox Media's 2022 Code Conference in Los Angeles. He said the plan was nixed months before the 2016 presidential election.
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"We, at that point, estimated with some of Twitter's help that a substantial portion, not a majority, were not real," Iger said. "I don't remember the number, but we discounted the value heavily. But that was built into our economics. Actually, the deal that we had was pretty cheap."
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Iger has spoken before about Disney's aborted plans for Twitter. In 2019, he appeared on CNBC's Mad Money and discussed with host Jim Cramer about how he had contemplated a deal for buying the social media platform.
"Well, I got cold feet for the right reasons," Iger told Cramer. "I thought we'd be taking on responsibility that we shouldn't take on" because "it was too complex in terms of Twitter's place in the world."
He went into more detail about the proposed Twitter deal at Code Conference.
"We were intent on going into the streaming business. We needed a technology solution. We have all this great IP," he said. "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."
Disney went on to buy a majority interest in sports streaming website BAMTech, which was later rebranded to Disney Streaming.
Iger stepped down as CEO in 2020 and was replaced by Bob Chapek. He remained in an executive chairman role at Disney until retiring in December 2021.
Much of the current dispute between Musk and Twitter hinges on bots. Twitter has said it uses a different definition for spam accounts than Musk, focusing instead on the number of what it calls "monetizable daily active users." The company also argues that of its 238 million active monthly users, less than 5 percent of the accounts are fake. Musk, meanwhile, has argued that the number of bots makes up more than 5 percent.
Newsweek reached out to Twitter for comment.
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