Its decision came after Twitter announced pricing for the new version of its API.
Advertisers that use Microsoft’s social media management platform won’t be able to access Twitter on their dashboard after April 25. The internet behemoth has declared on its Advertising platform page, as Mashable was the first to disclose, that in a few days its Digital Marketing Center’s Smart Campaigns with Multi-platform tool will no longer support the social network. Over a month after Twitter disclosed the cost for customers to access its API, the announcement was made. While the business was reticent to discuss price for enterprise customers, Wired previously claimed that the least expensive bundle was $42,000 per month.
Microsoft could easily afford to pay that, but it appears that it decided to stop supporting Twitter. Advertisers will no longer be able to use the website’s social media management tool to create, manage, or schedule draught tweets, as well as to examine previous tweets and engagements. Other social networking platforms including “Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn will continue to be available,” according to Microsoft’s release.
After Microsoft’s announcement, Elon Musk responded to a tweet reporting its decision with a threat to take legal action against the company. “They trained illegally using Twitter data. Lawsuit time,” Twitter’s owner wrote. He didn’t elaborate on how Microsoft illegally trained anything using Twitter data, but it’s worth noting that the tech giant is a key backer of ChatGPT developer OpenAI. The executive co-founded OpenAI back in 2015, but he distanced himself from the organization and has been vocally criticizing the chatbot and AI as a whole as of late. Musk also recently revealed his plans for his own AI company that could rival OpenAI and Google.
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Whether Musk’s lawsuit threat would actually materialize remains to be seen. Regardless, Microsoft’s decision came at a very bad time for Twitter. The website has been steadily losing advertisers since Musk took over, and according to digital marketing analysis firm Pathmatics by Sensor Tower, less than half of its top 1,000 advertisers spent money on ads in January.
