Apple Inc has threatened to block Twitter Inc from its app store without issuing a clear reason.

According to the new Twitter CEO Elon Musk, Apple has recently been “pressuring Twitter over content moderation demands,” and has reportedly stopped advertising on the giant social media platform.

“Apple has mostly stopped advertising on Twitter. Do they hate free speech in America?” Musk said in a tweet last month.

This is not the first the first time Apple is taking an action against other social media apps; it previously removed apps such as Gab and Parler.

Parler was, however, restored by Apple in 2021 after updating its content and moderation practices.

Randal Picker, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School says: “It wasn’t clear to me how far up the Apple food chain that idea went internally and without knowing that it isn’t clear how seriously to take any of this.”

According to Pathmatics, an ad measurement firm, Apple “spent an estimated $131,600 on Twitter ads between November 10 and November 16, down from $220,800 between October 16 and October 22, the week before Musk closed the Twitter deal.”

Last week, citing an internal Twitter document, Washington Post reported that “in the first quarter of 2022, Apple was the top advertiser on Twitter, spending $48m and accounting for more than 4 per cent of total revenue for the period.”

Ben Bajarin, the head of consumer technologies at research firm Creative Strategies, believes Musk “may be reading too much into a regular process Apple goes through for app reviews.”

“App review from Apple is not perfect by any means and a consistently frustrating process for developers but from what I hear it is a two-way conversation,” he says.