Elon Musk has questioned whether tech giant Apple hates free speech after the iPhone-maker pulled most of its Twitter advertising.
The South African businessman has gone on a Twitter rampage overnight, taking aim at “psy ops,” Apple’s Twitter advertising and App Store policies, CNN, and Twitter’s supposed “free speech suppression” files.
What’s going on here @tim_cook?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 28, 2022
“Apple has mostly stopped advertising on Twitter,” he wrote, “do they hate free speech in America?”
For the avoidance of doubt, choosing not to advertise on the increasingly brand unsafe Twitter does not constitute a renouncement of free speech in America or anywhere else. In fact, Apple is just one of hundreds of companies who have chosen to pull their ad dollars away from Twitter.
Musk, with his base of weird internet nerds fired up, took aim at Apple’s App Store policies claiming that Apple imposes a “secret” 30 per cent tax on everything you buy through the app store. However, that supposedly clandestine mark up is far from secret. Meta has been moaning about it for some time, for instance.
LBRY.com, which claims to do “to publishing what Bitcoin does to money,” then said that Apple had “censored” it by demanding its apps filter some of the search terms being returned. If it did not, its apps would not be allowed in the store.
Then, Musk tweeted another his infamous Twitter polls asking whether “Apple should publish all censorship actions it has taken that affect its customers.” At the time of writing 85 per cent of users had replied ‘Yes.’
Apple should publish all censorship actions it has taken that affect its customers
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 28, 2022
Its unclear what Musk gets out of all this, save for shifting the topic of conversation away from his disastrous tenure in charge of Twitter. But, for sanity of B&T staffers, can someone please Take Musk’s phone away from him?
