Microsoft Advertising ditches Twitter, and then Elon Musk threatens a lawsuit

Microsoft Advertising will no longer support Twitter, and this action may have caused Twitter’s CEO Elon Musk to threaten a lawsuit against Microsoft.

Today, Microsoft Advertising posted an update on a support page, stating that its “Smart Campaigns with Multi-platform will no longer support Twitter”starting April 25. There’s no stated reason for this move, but it’s likely that it has to do with Twitter switching to a paid API for larger businesses.

They trained illegally using Twitter data. Lawsuit time.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 19, 2023

When this move was mentioned on the independent Twitter Daily News account, Elon Musk suddenly replied to this post with a quick message: “They trained illegally using Twitter data. Lawsuit time.”

Right now it’s unclear exactly what Musk means about “trained illegally using Twitter data”. It’s possible Musk could be accusing Microsoft of using the Twitter API to train its AI services like Bing Chat. He offered no evidence of any such activity.

Both Twitter and Musk have been in the news quite a lot over the past few weeks. Earlier in April, Twitter blocked people from liking, replying, or retweeting posts that had links from Substack for a few days. Musk also accused Substack of downloading “a massive portion of the Twitter database”to help support the recently launched Substack Notes. Again, he offered no proof of that activity.

More recently, he’s labeled some media outlets as being government funded, which has caused NPR to no longer post on its Twitter accounts.