After dropping Twitter from one of its advertising platforms, Chief Tweet Elon Musk threatens Microsoft in a lawsuit for training illegally using Twitter data. By April 25, Microsoft advertising clients will not be able to access and engage on their Twitter accounts through Smart Campaigns.
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Twitter CEO Elon Musk speaks at the "Twitter 2.0: From Conversations to Partnerships," marketing conference in Miami Beach, Florida, on April 18, 2023.
Dropping Twitter
Microsoft Corp. announced that the company's social media planning and scheduling tools for advertisers will no longer support Twitter starting April 25. According to Bloomberg's report, this comes after Twitter started charging for access to its programming interface.
Smart Campaigns ad platform aims to help advertisers manage social media ad campaigns on service. Aside from Twitter, the supports Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. But as Microsoft announced dropping Twitter, users of the product will not be able to create tweets, engage, and use communicate through the platform.
While the company did not disclose its main reason for winding down the support, Twitter is reportedly planning to charge companies from $42,000 to as much as $210,000 per month for access to the company's API. This will allow third-party applications to interface with the platform.
TechCrunch reported that this moment comes at the wrong timing for Twitter and Musk, who has been actively working to earn advertisers' trust after losing more than half of the platform's top 1,000 advertising when he took over the company in October.
Filing a Lawsuit Against Microsoft
Chief Tweet Elon Musk threatened Microsoft with filing a lawsuit and accused the company of illegally using Twitter's data to train its artificial intelligence model. By dropping Twitter, it will not allow ad buyers to manage all of their social media accounts in one place. As per PCMag, no evidence was yet provided by Musk to prove the illegal training.
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CNBC reported that Musk has always been tweeting about planning to sue. However, no lawsuit appears to have been filed by the CEO. This threat marks that data ownership is rapidly becoming a battleground in the generative AI rush.
Not only Twitter, but a lot of companies are working to develop AI models similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT. One of Microsoft's efforts is investing $10 billion in OpenAI last year in an unusual deal, developing its own model and selling access to the ChatGPT maker.
Musk also has been of a "beef" with Microsoft ever since he left the company a few years ago. Before this partnership, Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 but left the board in 2018. Since then, he periodically criticized the company for allegedly spouting misinformation, propaganda, and promoting political correctness.
In response to this, he is planning to develop its own rival, countering OpenAI and Microsoft with his own AI chatbot program called TruthGPT.
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