ELON MUSK SAYS APPLE THREATENED HIM TO REMOVE TWITTER FROM THE APP STORE

In a series of tweets on Monday, Elon Musk accused Apple Inc of threatening to ban Twitter Inc from its app store without explaining why. He also claimed that the iPhone manufacturer had halted advertising on the social media network.

The wealthy CEO of Twitter and Tesla said that Apple was putting pressure on Twitter over content control requirements.

Apple has not confirmed the action, but it would not be unexpected given that the company has frequently enforced its policies and has deleted applications such as Gab and Parler.

Apple reinstated Parler, which is popular among US conservatives, in 2021 after the app changed its content and moderation policies, the firms claimed at the time.

"Apple has mostly discontinued advertising on Twitter." "Do they despise free speech in America?" Musk, who bought Twitter for $44 billion last month, said in a tweet.

In a subsequent message, he tagged Apple CEO Tim Cook's Twitter account, asking "what's going on here?"

Apple did not react quickly to calls for comment.

"It wasn't apparent to me how high up the Apple food chain that concept went internally," Randal Picker, a law professor at the University of Chicago, said.

According to ad monitoring firm Pathmatics, the world's most valuable company spent an estimated $131,600 on Twitter advertisements between Nov. 10 and Nov. 16, down from $220,800 between Oct. 16 and Oct. 22, the week before Musk concluded the Twitter transaction.

According to an internal Twitter document, Apple was the leading advertiser on Twitter in the first quarter of 2022, spending $48 million and accounting for more than 4% of overall revenue for the time.

Twitter did not immediately react to a request for comment on the allegation from Reuters.