Forbes Business
BREAKING ‘Lawsuit Time’: Musk Feuds With
Microsoft After It Drops
Twitter From Advertising Platform Siladitya Ray Forbes Staff Covering breaking news and tech policy stories at Forbes. Following Apr 20, 2023, 01:36am EDT | Press play to listen to this article! Got it! Updated Apr 20, 2023, 06:38am EDT Share to
Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Topline Twitter CEO
Elon Musk Wednesday threatened to sue Microsoft, accusing the software giant of “illegally” using data from the
Social Media platform, hours after Microsoft dropped Twitter from its online advertising platform.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk leaves the Phillip Burton Federal Building in San Francisco,
California. Getty Images Key Facts Earlier on Wednesday, Mashable and other outlets reported that Microsoft was removing Twitter integration from its advertising platform, which allows brands to manage all their social media feeds from a single dashboard. From April 25, Microsoft Digital Marketing Center users will no longer be able to access their Twitter feeds, make or schedule new posts from its “Smart Campaigns” tool, the company said in a notice , although access to Facebook,
Instagram, and LinkedIn will continue to remain available. Although Microsoft did not specify a reason, reports suggest Twitter’s plan to charge enterprises for accessing its API—which allows third parties to integrate Twitter services—may have played a role, with fees starting at $42,000 a month. Responding to a news report about Microsoft’s move, Musk tweeted “lawsuit time,” vaguely accusing Microsoft of “illegally using Twitter data” for training—presumably referring OpenAI’s GPT language model that powers Microsoft’s AI services. When one user pushed Musk about the negative impact of Twitter’s steep API fees, the Twitter CEO responded by saying he was open to ideas but did not approve of Microsoft’s approach of allegedly “ripping off the Twitter database, demonetizing it (removing ads) and then selling our data to others.” Musk did not share any evidence to support his allegations and OpenAI’s ChatGPT—which has been integrated into Microsoft’s Bing search engine and other services—does not disclose the source of its training data. Key Background Microsoft’s latest move is likely to compound Twitter’s advertising woes, as small and medium-sized businesses use the Digital Marketing Center dashboard to easily manage their ad campaigns across multiple platforms. Musk recently claimed most advertisers, who had ditched Twitter following his takeover, have returned and the company was now “roughly breaking even.” Musk did not elaborate on this claim, and a report by Vox last month found that more than half of the top 1,000 advertisers on Twitter, prior to Musk’s acquisition, no longer show ads on the platform. Advertisers have been concerned about “brand safety” after Musk loosened Twitter’s rules on tackling hateful content. Speaking at a major advertisers’ conference on Tuesday, Musk said he was willing to work with brands on where their ads are displayed on Twitter’s website, but he will not allow them to dictate the platform’s content policy, and “freedom of speech” will remain “paramount.” Tangent According to an analysis published by the
Washington Post on Wednesday, several major large language models—including Google’s T5 and Facebook’s LLaMA—were trained using data from a variety of websites. Large language models serve as the core building blocks of AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Google’s Bard. The data accessed by the Post showed websites like Wikipedia, Scribd,
Google Patents,
New York Times and several others were used to train these models. The report also notes that social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook disallow the scraping of their data, which effectively prevents AI language models from using them for training. The Post ’s analysis does not necessarily reflect the websites that OpenAI relied on to train its GPT-3 and GPT-4 language models, as OpenAI has not made that information public. Further Reading Microsoft drops Twitter from its advertising platform (Mashable) Musk Says Twitter Is Willing To Address Advertiser Concerns But ‘Freedom Of Speech Is Paramount’ (Forbes) Follow me on Twitter . Send me a secure tip . Siladitya Ray Editorial Standards Print Reprints & Permissions