Twitter Sends Microsoft Mean Letter Because Elon Is Mad - Gizmodo

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Twitter Sends Microsoft Mean Letter Because Elon Is Mad - Gizmodo

Twitter accused Microsoft of inappropriately harvesting the social media company’s data to build apps, according to a Friday report in the New York Times . The news comes exactly one month after Microsoft dropped Twitter from its advertising platform, which prompted an angry Tweet from world’s saltiest billionaire Elon Musk. Netflix Passwords, ChatGPT Can’t Detect AI, and No More CoTweets Editor Picks “They trained illegally using Twitter data. Lawsuit time,” Musk tweeted then. The charge comes in a letter addressed to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, sent by Alex Spiro, one of Musk’s personal attorneys. “As you are no doubt aware, for years, Microsoft has used Twitter’s standard developer APIs free of charge in order to benefit from Twitter’s data and services in key Microsoft products that generate tens of billions of dollars in revenue for Microsoft annually,” Spiro wrote. The letter lays out a number of allegations, and demands an audit of all the ways Microsoft collected and used Twitter’s suddenly precious data. Usually the context comes after the content in an article, but let’s start with the fun part. Mr. Billionaire Business Maverick has a little pattern going here. At Twitter, Elon keeps making wild decisions that, at least according to social media pundits, seem impulsive and not well considered. When this affects big tech companies like Apple and Microsoft, they won’t put up with it, in part because they understand business is ostensibly about business, not feelings. Then Elon gets upset and calls them out on Twitter, all the while acting like he’s the one being reasonable. Here we go again! If you want to understand this billionaire-on-millionaire drama (Microsoft’s Nadella is worth something like $861 million), you need three sentences-worth of technical knowledge. It’s worth it. Basically, Elon started charging for a tool that’s always been free. Microsoft didn’t want to pay for it, so it didn’t fork over any money, and Elon seems insulted. Twitter is a platform, which means it hopes that other people will build apps and other cool stuff on top of it. To encourage that, Twitter provides an “application programming interface,” or API, a tool that lets computer programs talk to each other and exchange data. Other social media companies like Facebook and TikTok have APIs too, and they’re typically free because the arrangement is mutually beneficial. Ok, technology explainer over. Twitter’s API was always free. Then Elon Musk showed up and said everyone had to pay for it . That’s abnormal—and antagonistic to the companies and developers who’ve spent years working with Twitter. Microsoft is (or was) a regular user of Twitter’s API. No one had a problem with it, at least not out in any public temper tantrum kind of way. According to Musk’s threatening letter, Microsoft integrated the API with apps including Xbox One Social, Bing Pages, Azure, and the Microsoft Ads platform. The letter says Microsoft used the API in a number of ways that violated Twitter’s terms of service. For one, Twitter throttles the rate at which you can collect data, but “Despite these limitations, the Microsoft Apps accessed Twitter’s APIs over 780 million times and retrieved over 26 billion tweets in 2022 alone,” the letter says. The letter also says Microsoft didn’t disclose all the ways it used Twitter data, which violates the terms of service as well. CNBC got a copy of the letter, you can read it here . Microsoft didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Twitter’s press email now automatically responds with a poop emoji . Earlier this year, Musk announced that its once-free API would become a paid service. That had a number of consequences which Elon either didn’t think of or didn’t take seriously. One of them is it broke a lot of fun Twitter robots that everyone loves (like this one , which tweets whenever the New York Times prints a word that’s never been in the newspaper before). You can tell Musk didn’t think this plan through because he kept changing his mind about how it was going to work when people made fun of him. The right to tweet or download tweets is something that a lot of organizations don’t seem willing to pay for. New York City, for example, said it would shutter its MTA bot which tweets about subway delays, until Twitter said, “Wai...