Twitter is removed from another central B2B platform. This time it’s one of the biggest companies in the tech industry. Microsoft will remove Twitter from its Microsoft Advertising plan next week, the company announced.
Microsoft’s announcement comes just a day after Twitter owner Elon Musk appeared at a significant marketing and advertising conference. At the event, Musk was trying to lure brands back to the platform after Twitter lost half of its biggest advertisers following his acquisition of the company.
Although Microsoft did not comment further on the move, the cost of the Twitter connection is likely the reason. Musk had already announced that Twitter would charge a fee of $42,000 a month for access to its API starting April 29. Many smaller companies, such as bot creator Tapbots, have withdrawn from Twitter due to the hefty fee.
Government agencies such as the U.S. Weather Service also discontinued their service on Twitter because they could not afford the fee. Consequently, users will no longer receive severe weather warnings via Twitter in the future.
Elon Musk interpreted the withdrawal of Microsoft’s advertising platform from his short message service as a personal attack and vowed revenge through lawsuits. “Lawsuit time,” as Musk writes on his platform. Musk said to the reason for the case, “They illegally trained them with Twitter data.”
This vague threat seems to refer to OpenAI’s use of Twitter data. These were used to train the language model behind ChatGPT. OpenAI is an independent company, but it is closely tied to Microsoft. It needs to be clarified, however, how Musk intends to use this argument to take Microsoft to the legal cleaners.
“The Verge” asked Twitter for a statement but only received the usual feces emoji. Microsoft did not want to comment further, but confirmed that its advertising platform will no longer support Twitter after April 25, 2023.