Elon Musk threatens to sue Meta’s Twitter clone

According to a media report, Twitter is threatening the Facebook group Meta with a lawsuit because of the rival app Threads that has just been launched. A Twitter lawyer accused Meta in a letter of using confidential information and internal knowledge of the short message service for threads, the website wrote semaphore on Thursday and released a copy of the letter. “Competition is okay, cheating isn’t,” Twitter owner Elon Musk wrote on the report.

Meta released its Twitter competitor app on Thursday night. Threads is considered Twitter’s closest rival to date, partly because the app can draw on a base of more than a billion user accounts from Meta’s photo and video app Instagram.

Threads had 30 million users in the first half day, as Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg announced. His Threads account now has more than two million followers.

In the letter, Twitter and Musk’s attorney Alex Spiro claimed, among other things, that Meta specifically hired dozens of ex-employees of the short message service who had confidential internal information. Musk has laid off thousands of employees since the takeover last October. Many of them found new jobs at other tech companies. So-called noncompete requirements, which prohibit employers from working for a competitor for a certain period of time, are prohibited in California.

At Meta, the allegations were rejected, wrote Semafor. For example, no former Twitter employees worked in the Threads development team, it said.

Spiro Meta also warned against picking up publicly available data on Twitter – for example about who is following whom on the short message service. So far there was no indication that Meta would operate something like this. Threads wouldn’t really need this either, since the app can build on existing connections between Instagram users. Twitter reduced the number of tweets you can see for free to 1,000 per day over the weekend – angering many users. The measure was explained with alleged data tapping.

The meta app looks pretty much like Twitter. You can follow other users and forward posts to your own followers. Instagram users can simply use their Instagram photo app profile for threads. Text posts on threads can be up to 500 characters long and can contain links, photos, and videos up to five minutes long. When Twitter was launched in 2006, the text limit was originally 140 characters and was later doubled to 280 characters.

At the same time, there are some significant differences. In addition to the accounts they follow, Thread users also get “recommended content” from other profiles in their feed. The posts are not displayed in chronological order, but sorted by the software. First of all, there is no option to only display content from the profiles that you follow. But this is “on the list” for the future, assured Instagram boss Mosseri. Threads currently works like Twitter’s “For You” feed, where tweets are sorted by algorithms.