The billionaire CEO of Twitter and Tesla, Elon Musk, accused Apple Inc of threatening to remove Twitter from its App Store.
Musk revealed the potential App Store ban in a series of tweets from his official twitter handle, wondering if the tech group hated free speech.
According to Musk, the iPhone Marker terminated most of its advertising on Twitter and was putting the platform under pressure over content moderation demands.
“Apple has mostly stopped advertising on Twitter. Do they hate free speech in America?” asked the Twitter owner who took the platform private for $44bn previous month.
Musk also addressed Apple CEO Tim Cook’s directly in a tweet, asking, “What’s going on here @tim_cook?”
Several companies halted spending on Twitter
The feud comes as a number of companies have stopped spending on Twitter amid concerns about Elon Musk’s content moderation plans for the social media platform. Companies including Cheerios maker General Mills and Volkswagen are among the firms that have halted their spending in recent weeks.
Musk plans to generate revenue by making Twitter verification a paid subscription service, but currently the maximum revenue of the site comes from advertising.
Apple advertisements on Twitter
According to Pathmatics, an ad measurement firm, Apple spent an estimated $131,600 on Twitter ads from November 10 to November 16, which was decreased from $220,800 that was spent between October 16 and October 22, the week beforeElon Musk closed the Twitter deal.
In the first quarter of 2022, Apple was the top advertiser on Twitter, spending $48m and accounting for more than 4% of total revenue for the period, The Washington Post reported, citing an internal Twitter document.
Twitter not the first
The action, yet unconfirmed by Apple, would not be strange as the company has regularly enforced its guidelines and previously removed apps such as Parler and Gab. Parler was later restored by Apple in 2021 after the app updated its moderation practices, the companies said at the time.