Microsoft no longer sends advertising to Twitter – Musk threatens to sue

Microsoft’s advertising network has announced that it will end its tools’ collaboration with Twitter in a few days. The new owner, the multi-billionaire Elon Musk, then threatened the Redmond-based software group with a lawsuit.

Microsoft Advertising offers advertisers the opportunity to automatically populate their own social media channels when running online campaigns. So if, for example, the advertisement for a new product starts to be distributed, you can also publish time-coordinated posts on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn at the same time.

So far, Twitter has also been one of the supported social networks. On April 25, however, this option will be switched off, as per Microsoft’s advertising department support page informed. Then not only is it no longer possible to manage draft tweets and their scheduled publication, but statistics on the performance of Twitter posts that have already been published are also no longer available because the connection to the corresponding API is cut.

Lawsuit time

Microsoft does not provide any information about the reasons for the deactivation of the function. However, it is likely that Musk is gradually adding payment barriers to the API access to the platform. Ultimately, it is probably not worthwhile for Microsoft to pay money here in order to be able to offer the feature to customers. They would then have to look around at other service providers if they wanted to continue to include Twitter in their advertising strategy.

Musk reacted indignantly to the announcement. “You trained illegally using Twitter data. Time for a lawsuit,” he explained. What exactly is meant by this remains unclear, and the company has not answered questions from the press for some time. However, it is possible that what is meant here is that Microsoft obtained advertising data via the interface and also used it to train AI systems with which the display of advertising is optimized. However, the Twitter owner did not publish any further evidence, so it remains to be seen what may come next.

See also:

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