Meta may have found initial success with its Twitter competitor Threads, but that could land the two tech giants in court.
Threads launched on Wednesday night, hours before its planned introduction, and quickly gained tens of millions of users, The Associated Press reported.
Twitter, however, has sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg that alleges that Meta used Twitter’s former employees to create the program, according to the AP.
Semafor was first to report on the letter which reads, “Twitter has serious concerns that Meta Platforms has engaged in a systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property,” NBC News reported.
But Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said, “No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing.”
The letter submitted by Elon Musk’s attorney, Alex Spiro, demanded that Meta not collect data from Twitter without permission.
Musk also took to Twitter to share his take on the Threads/Twitter debate, writing, “Competition is fine, cheating is not.”
The letter doesn’t say outright if Twitter will sue but does say, “Twitter reserves all rights, including, but not limited to, the right to seek both civil remedies and injunctive relief without further notice,” Forbes reported.
Threads is not the only app that takes inspiration from Twitter. There’s also Mastodon and former President Donald Trump’s Truth Social platforms, according to BBC News.
Threads, which is billed as an “Instagram app,” functions a lot like Twitter, using text — limited to 500 characters — to share thoughts. Users can tag each other using @ and can reply or “repost” a thread. There is no option to direct message someone on Threads.
Since it is connected to Instagram, users can keep their username and follow some or all of the accounts that they do on the photo-sharing app, The Washington Post reported.
Unlike Twitter, there is no chronological, following-only feed of threads. The platform’s algorithm decides what users see, Engadget reported. There is also no post editing, hashtags or desktop version of Threads. More development, however, is planned.
The launch of Threads came after Musk made several changes in addition to limiting the number of tweets that can be read, including requiring users to be verified if they use TweetDeck to manage several accounts at the same time, the AP reported.
