Twitter Threatens To Sue Meta Over Threads App

Uploaded on 2023-07-11 in TECHNOLOGY-Key Areas-Social Media, FREE TO VIEW

Twitter is threatening legal action against Meta over its popular rival app called Threads accusing the social media giant of poaching former employees to create a “copycat” application. Threads, which was launched to millions recently, is similar to Twitter and has been pitched by Meta bosses as a "friendly" alternative. 

The app, which was created by the company's Instagram team, comes when many people are looking for Twitter alternatives.

An attorney for Twitter describing as a "copycat" app allegedly developed by hiring former employees of the micro-blogging platform owned by Elon Musk and using the company's trade secrets, according to a letter posted on the Semafor news website.  

Twitter's Elon Musk said "competition is fine, cheating is not", but Meta denied claims in a legal letter that ex-Twitter staff helped create Threads. 

So far, nearly 100 million people are claimed  have signed up for the new app,compared to the  estimated 350 million users on Twitter. It took Twitter four years to build the same number of users that Threads gained in a day - though Twitter grew its users from scratch, while Threads was able to cross-promote itself to the pre-existing 2 billion users already on Instagram.   

US copyright law does not protect ideas, so for Twitter to be successful in court it would have to prove that its own intellectual property, such as programming code, was used.

Just over a decade ago Meta was given a patent for "communicating a newsfeed" the system that displays all the latest posts when Facebook is used. Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino said in a recent tweet that while the platform, is "often imitated" it "can never be duplicated".  

Recently both Meta and Twitter have started a large number of layoffs, with Meta announcing in April that it would cut staff levels by approximately 10,000. Twitter lost a large proportion of its 7,500 employees, as high as 80%, in waves of redundancies following Mr Musk's takeover last October.

Threads:    BBC:    NYTimes:    Endgadget:    CBS:    ITV:     Standard:    Statista:     Rolling Stone: 

Semafor:   Guardian:     Image: Bastian Riccardi on Unsplash

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