ICYMI: Elon Musk Rides Twitter into Battle Against Apple

Eccentric billionaire Elon Musk has recently, and controversially, become the owner of social media leviathan Twitter, and things are going just about as chaotically as you’d expect.

First came a massive wave of layoffs, meant to prevent the platform from going into bankruptcy.  Then there was the throttled reinstatement of a number of previously banned accounts – something that American liberals have attempted unsuccessfully to decry as “hate speech”.

And now there’s Apple, who is threatening to remove Twitter from its App Store.

Twitter owner Elon Musk claimed on Monday in a series of tweets that Apple had threatened to remove the Twitter app from the App Store as part of its app review moderation process.

“Apple has also threatened to withhold Twitter from its App Store, but won’t tell us why,” Musk tweeted.

And that wasn’t all:

In other tweets fired off on Monday morning, he called Apple’s App Store fees a “secret 30% tax,” and ran a poll asking if “Apple should publish all censorship actions it has taken that affect its customers.” He also claimed that Apple has pulled most of its advertising from Twitter.

Apple’s App Store is the only way to distribute software to iPhones. If the Twitter app were pulled, the social network would lose one of its main distribution platforms, although the service is available for the web.

The move comes as Musk continues to push the ideology of “free speech” on the social network, which is an idea that has seemingly found resistance among those on the left side of the aisle.