Twitter has threatened to sue Meta for launching Threads, which is intended to rival Elon Musk’s social network and has already attracted tens of millions of users despite the recent launch.
In a letter to Meta Chairman Mark Zuckerberg, attorney Alex Spiro, representing Twitter, accused the company of using Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property by hiring former Twitter employees to create an app that imitates Twitter. this social network.
The decision further escalates tensions between the two social media conglomerates after Threads went live on Wednesday amid unpopular changes Musk has made to Twitter since buying the platform last year for $44 billion.
Reacting to Spiro’s letter, Meta spokesman Andy Stone wrote today, directly to Threads: “No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee, that doesn’t exist.”
In the letter, which the Semafor news site released on Thursday, Spiro assured that Twitter “strictly seeks to guarantee its intellectual property rights” and highlighted the company’s right to seek a solution in a civil process or a court order.
He added that the letter marks a “formal communication” to Meta to keep relevant documents for a possible dispute between the companies.
Responding to a message on Twitter about possibly taking legal action against Meta, Musk wrote: “Competition is good, cheating is not.”
Some analysts thought Meta’s new product, touted as a text-based version of the Instagram photo-sharing app, might be a concern for Twitter, pointing to the excitement surrounding its launch and the impressive number of users it has already picked up.
But success is not guaranteed. Industry watchers cite Meta’s history of launching standalone apps that are later shut down, noting that Threads is in its infancy.
Among other issues detected, the new Meta app raised concerns about data privacy. Despite having been released in more than 100 countries, it is not available in the European Union, precisely because of the strict privacy rules that exist here.
Zuckerberg announced today that Threads has already captured 70 million users: “70 million registrations on Threads at the close of this morning. Far above our expectations,” he wrote in his account on this platform.
Meta, which owns Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, made Threads available to the public ahead of schedule, at midnight on Wednesday.
Its proximity to Instagram has contributed to its strong growth. In any case, observers point out that Instagram has two billion users worldwide and Twitter 450 million, to emphasize that it is still too early for Threads to win.
Source: TSF
