Elon Musk says that Twitter has been "Threatening to be Withheld" from the App Store by Apple

It wouldn't be the first time Apple has Twitter-related concerns.

In response to allegations that Apple "threatened to withheld" Twitter from its store, Elon Musk has criticized the company's App Store regulations. Musk claims that Apple "won't tell us why" it is having problems with Twitter.

Musk criticized Apple's 30 % "tax" on in-app sales in later tweets and asserted that the company has "censored" other developers. Apple "has virtually stopped advertising on Twitter," he added. (Apple wouldn't be the first significant advertiser in recent weeks to do this.)

It wouldn't be the first time that Apple has criticized Twitter. Yoel Roth, the former head of trust and safety at Twitter, claimed that during the course of reviewing apps for the Apple App Store, reviewers frequently highlighted content on Twitter.

In a blog post, Roth claimed that app reviewers had pointed out instances of racist insults and nudity on the service. "In my tenure at Twitter, representatives of the app stores often highlighted concerns about content available on our platform," Roth wrote. These review methods "have the capacity to derail company plans and precipitate all-hands-on-deck crises for weeks or months at a time," despite the fact that they "appears to be driven entirely by manual checks and anecdotes."

A request for comment from Apple did not immediately receive a response.

Musk didn't say whether Apple is delaying fresh service updates or threatening to remove the app entirely from its store. But there have been a few recent problems that might have prompted more investigation into Twitter.

The Guardian claimed on Sunday that until government officials informed Twitter of the presence of a "freshly published" video of a 2019 terror assault at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, the firm had not yet removed it. The growth in hate speech and the re-instatement of well-known accounts that were banned for violating Twitter's hate speech standards have also drawn a great deal of criticism from campaigners. Additionally, Musk just declared his intention to "amnesty" banned users.

Apple has tight guidelines that are applied inconsistently that control what can be included in apps available through its store. Due to its inadequate content control policies, Parler, a "free speech" competitor to Twitter, was banned from the App Store for months (the app was reinstated after it rolled out an AI-based moderation system). Tumblr restricted adult content in 2018 after it was briefly taken down from the App Store.

Although it's unclear how things stand between Twitter and Apple, posts seen by CNN indicate that the iPhone manufacturer was running Black Friday advertisements there as recently as last Thursday.

As the economy deteriorated, many businesses cut back on their digital advertising expenditures, and Twitter was probably never a significant component of Apple's advertising budget. However, if Musk is successful in making Twitter's main business more dependent on subscription revenue and potentially has to give a 30% cut to Apple, Apple's impact on Twitter may be much more significant.

Musk questioned his nearly 120 million followers in a tweet on Monday if they were aware that "Apple charges a sneaky 30% tax on anything you buy through their App Store." He also tweeted a picture of a freeway exit, with one lane pointing in the direction of "pay 30%" and the other pointing in the direction of "go to war." Old "Elon" automobile slid in the direction of the latter.