Microsoft announced that it is dropping Twitter from its Microsoft Advertising plan as from 25 April 2023. The tech giant made this announcement via an update on one of its help pages:
“Starting on April 25, 2023, Smart Campaigns with Multi-platform will no longer support Twitter. As of April 25, 2023, you’ll be unable to:
- Access your Twitter account through our social management tool
- Create and manage drafts or Tweets
- View past Tweets and engagement
- Schedule Tweets“
Microsoft stated that other social media channels such as Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn will continue to be available.
Microsoft has started sending a similar email to its Microsoft Advertising users stating that “Digital Marketing Center (DMC) will no longer support Twitter starting on April 25, 2023.”
Beforehand, Microsoft Advertising feature permitted advertisers to handle their social media accounts from diverse platforms in a single location. Users were able to reply to tweets, direct messages, and other messages received on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
Microsoft’s action comes just days before Elon Musk’s Twitter plans to shutdown its old API platform to transition to its new paid Twitter API subscription plans on April 29.
After Twitter’s announcement of its exorbitant pricing for API access, numerous independent developers had to shut down their Twitter-based applications. Similarly, larger corporations and organizations, including Microsoft, have also decided not to pay Twitter’s high fees. Twitter says it will charge a minimum of $42,000 per month to users of its API, which include enterprises and research institutions.
Interestingly, Elon Musk is not taking this news lightly. He threatened to sue Microsoft for training illegally using Twitter data. According to him, “They trained illegally using Twitter data. Lawsuit time.”
The billioinare CEO is apparently referring to Microsoft’s licensing arrangement with the AI outfit OpenAI — which trained its powerful AI models on a “vast corpus of diverse text data from the internet,” per OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT.
Microsoft is yet to respond to Musk’s allegations or threat to sue.
