Elon Musk said in a stream of tweets Monday that Apple has “mostly” stopped advertising on Twitter and threatened to “withhold” the social media platform from the app store.
“Do they hate free speech in America?” Musk tweeted. The business magnate also tagged Apple CEO Tim Cook in the thread asking, “what’s going on here.”
Shortly after, Musk ran a poll on Twitter asking if Apple should release all of the censoring efforts it has made that affect it’s consumers. Over 500,000 people had responded to the poll within an hour of it being tweeted.
Apple should publish all censorship actions it has taken that affect its customers
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 28, 2022
After, Musk sent out another tweet in which he informed his followers that Apple “threatened to withhold Twitter from its App Store” for an unspecified reason.
Twitter has seen a massive drop in revenue due to many advertisers pulling their campaigns. According to Musk, they are being pressured to do so by activists. Musk said, “Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation, and we did everything we could to appease the activists,” Musk previously tweeted. “Extremely messed up! They’re trying to destroy free speech in America.”
The activists he is most likely referring to is a group of more than 40 organizations, including the NAACP and GLAAD, who have sent an open letter calling on Twitter’s top 20 largest advertisers to cease advertising on the platform if Musk rolls back its current content-moderation practices.
“We know that brand safety is of the utmost importance to you,” the letter states. “As such, you also have a moral and civic obligation to take a stand against the degradation of one of the world’s most influential communications platforms, and to hold Musk to the pledge he made to you to ensure that Twitter is a welcoming and civil place for everyone.”
