For a while now, Vole’s Smart Campaigns service helped advertisers manage social media campaigns on services including Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. However, recently Musk decided to start charging users for access to its programming interface.
Microsoft appears to have thought that the service was worthwhile when it was free, but less useful now that it was costing and decided to shut it down on Twitter. As of April 25, product users can’t create tweets and drafts, or see past tweets and engagement.
While you might have expected a brilliant scheme in which you charged customers for something which had been free, you would lose a few customers, it seems that Musk didn’t factor that into his numbers.
Musk responded to the announcement by accusing Microsoft of using Twitter data “illegally” and threatening a lawsuit.
He seemed to imply that Microsoft had used Twitter data to train its “Bing” search engine and that it was “lawsuit time.”
The threat came yesterday, but so far, nothing has happened. But to be fair, neither has Musk’s affordable robot, it will probably arrive one of these days.
The software maker is the biggest investor in OpenAI, the AI research lab Musk co-founded before falling out with the team and leaving in 2018. Musk is now establishing his own rival AI effort.