Twitter, has threatened to sue Meta just hours after the Instagram parent company launched ‘Threads’, an App it hopes will beat out the struggling site owned by Elon Musk.
In a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, published by online news outlet Semafor on Thursday, 6th July 2023, Musk lawyer Alex Spiro accused the company of “unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property.”
The letter accused Meta of hiring dozens of former Twitter employees who “had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information”.
Thread, is the biggest challenger yet to Musk-owned Twitter, which has seen a series of potential competitors emerge but not yet replace one of the world’s biggest social media platforms, despite its struggles.
Zuckerberg’s latest move against Musk further heightened the rivalry between the two multibillionaires who have even agreed to meet for hand to hand combat in a cage match.
In Zuckerberg first tweet in over a decade, he posted a Spiderman pointing at Spiderman meme in an apparent reference to the similarities between Threads and Twitter.
Threads went live on Apple and Android app stores in 100 countries on Wednesday, 5th July 2023 and early feedback noted its close, but scaled back, resemblance to Twitter.
Within a few hours, more than 30 million people had downloaded Threads, Zuckerberg said yesterday.
“Feels like the beginning of something special, but we’ve got a lot of work ahead to build the app,”
Mark Zuckerberg
Zuckerberg wrote on his official Threads account on Thursday 5th July 2023.
Accounts were already active for celebrities such as Jennifer Lopez, Shakira and Hugh Jackman, President Bola Tinubu as well as media outlets including The Washington Post and The Economist.
On Threads, Zuckerberg wrote: “It’ll take some time, but I think there should be a public conversations app with 1 billion+ people on it.”
Twitter has said it has more than 200 million daily users.
‘Be Kind’
Threads was introduced as a spin-off of Instagram, giving it a built-in audience of more than two billion users and sparing the new platform the challenge of starting from scratch.
Meta has its legion of critics too, especially in the major market of Europe, which could slow the growth of Threads.
The company has been criticized for its handling of personal data, the essential ingredient for targeted ads that help it rake in billions of dollars in profits.
Story: Christy Dung