He turned his focus to Apple, claiming the company was going to withhold Twitter from its Apple Store and asking if Apple hated free speech in America, and tweeting at Apple CEO Tim Cook asking what is going on here.
Well then later in the day, Musk teased that he will be publishing what he calls the Twitter files, claiming the public deserves to know what Twitter has done in the past regarding free speech suppression.
And then finally I'm sure there's going to be more though he posted and panned a tweet saying that this is the battle for the future of civilization. If free speech is lost even in America, tyranny is all that lies ahead.
So glad we have our colleague and friend Daniel Sullivan here with us to talk about all. Where do you begin, right? It's like you have to laugh because it's like what else do you do? No CEO operates like this.
But it's really scary, is it not to see some of this stuff in the gun with what is going on? A lot going on. Let's start with Apple because that's what's important here. The Apple App Store has a kind of quality control so you can't just get any app on your phone.
Apple vets the apps and wants to make sure there are no viruses in them that could be spying on us, but also to make sure that they don't have apps on their App Store that promotes hate speech or dangerous misinformation.
We saw Parlor, which was a right-wing social media network, getting kicked off the App Store for a while last year until they cleaned up their hate speech rules. I think Twitter Elon Musk is concerned because he is taking down all the guardrails when it comes to the rules on the platform that Apple might turn around and say, hey, we don't want you on our App App Store anymore.
And I've. That happened, and Twitter was essentially unavailable as an app within iPhones, which could be devastating for Twitter. One other important point when it comes to Apple, we learned yesterday that Apple has stopped advertising on Twitter.
And the Washington Post reported that Apple in quarter one in the first quarter of this year, was Twitter's biggest advertiser, spending $48 million in the first quarter alone. So you can also see another reason why Musk is taking issue with Apple.
Well, that's the thing here. Whether he's doing it obviously out of some desperation, if he's doing it for attention, to try to get more eyes on Twitter. But the real issue, Dony, is that Apple is not the only one.
Major advertisers are no longer advertising on Twitter. And that poses a huge problem beyond just Elon Musk for the company, the stability and the longevity of the company itself. Absolutely. And look, speaking of the kind of tearing apart the whole rulebook that Twitter had these past few years, we just learned overnight, and I want to show you this screenshot from Twitter's website.
They are no longer enforcing their COVID-19 misinformation policy. Since 2020, Twitter has been working. They were not always perfect. There was a lot of misinformation about COVID about vaccines on the platform, but there were rules in place and policies in place.
We learned that that is no more that is no longer happening at Twitter. And that, again, might be another reason why Apple might say, hey, we don't want to have you on our app store. Finally, under that policy.
According to Twitter's numbers, since 2020, Twitter suspended 11,000 accounts for sharing misinformation. It's very possible that a lot of those accounts. We're going to see coming back onto the platform.
And one final thing, guys. The reason why I'm here in Florida, other than working in my town, is that we're about to hear today from a Twitter employee. You Ross, who was in charge of writing a lot of these rules, left the company a few weeks ago.
You basically couldn't work under Elon Musk anymore, and he's about to speak out at a conference here in Florida a little later today.