Elon Musk dropped a bombshell on Twitter on April 19, and this time, the new Twitter owner threatened to sue Microsoft. Musk’s ‘lawsuit time’ threat came after Microsoft dropped Twitter from its Smart Campaigns advertising platform, following which, starting April 25, Microsoft advertising clients won’t be able to access their Twitter accounts through Smart Campaigns.
Why did Microsoft drop Twitter from its advertising platform?
According to a report in the Wired, Twitter wants to charge companies from $42,000 to as much as $210,000 per month for accessing the company’s ‘Application Programming Interface’ or API, which allows third-party apps to interface with the social media service.
Twitter said that Microsoft declined to pay its API fees, following which it was dropped from company’s advertising platform.
Twitter-Microsoft ‘lawsuit’ row: What Elon Musk is accusing?
Elon Musk has accused Microsoft of mining Twitter’s data, such as user tweets, to help train its AI-powered programs. Musk appears to be demanding compensation.
“They trained illegally using Twitter data. Lawsuit time,” Musk said in a tweet.
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It is unclear if the ChatGPT AI programme is among the ones which according to Musk’s accusations, was trained using Twitter data.
According to the information previously released about development of Microsoft-controlled OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the Artificial Intelligence chatbot was trained on public internet data. Twitter’s API, just like Wikipedia articles or Reddit API, until earlier this year, was available free-of-cost.
Academics have used free access to Twitter’s API to analyse data on the kinds of conversations occurring on the platform, which helps them understand what the online world is talking about.
According to a report in the Wired, since 2020, there have been more than 17,500 academic papers based on the platform’s data, which appear to give legitimacy to Elon Musk’s argument that Twitter is the world’s “de facto town square.”
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