Apple, for liability reasons, takes their content policies pretty seriously.
When I worked for a social media company, our app once got pulled **WITHOUT NOTICE** because Apple reviewers found *two* violating pieces of content on an app with millions of videos.
To get the app restored, we had to submit not only proof we had acted on the content (it was, in Apple's defense, extremely objectionable, but had not been user-reported OR caught by our AI) but also a policy statement explaining how we would prevent this from happening again.
This isn't actually an ideological stance by Apple, it's 1) brand protection, 2) compliance, and 3) CYA.
Their primary motivation is discouraging Congress from regulating app marketplaces any further than it already has, by convincing legislators they can self-regulate.
[bold] There are people at Apple whose whole job is to review apps each time an update is submitted to the App Store.
A huge company like Twitter has a dedicated contact or team at Apple for this—but chances are Elon has laid off whomever at Twitter was that team's point of contact.
So, what has probably happened here is:
1) Twitter submitted an update, it went to their usual reviewer(s)
2) The reviewers found policy violations and got no response from Twitter, because their contacts are gone
3) Apple rejected the update and threatened to pull the app.
[bold/] It is highly doubtful that this is any new, Twitter-specific policy, or even evidence that Apple has an issue with the Elon takeover.
It is evidence that when you lay off your entire communications department, corporate communication becomes more difficult.
If Elon were a normal tech CEO, he would have done what every company does when they get an update rejected: called their contact at Apple, explained how and when they will cure the violations, tasked a team with doing so, then resubmitted the update.
But he is a chaos monkey.
Also, considering this is Twitter, there's no way this is the first time they've failed an objectionable content spot check.
This probably happens a lot—the reviewers need to meet their own performance metrics, after all—and every other time they've handled it normally.
If Elon didn't know about this before, by now somebody has surely explained it to him, so this isn't ignorance.
He has a history of launching weird half-functional products when he wants a little cash infusion (remember the flamethrowers that were just modded Airsoft rifles?)
He's not actually going to make any kind of a dent in the mobile phone market, but he may well talk a factory in China into modding some Huawei phones and slapping Tesla branding on them.
Then he'll sell them for $800 each to his fash fanboys.
It's ALWAYS a grift.
