NY.-Twitter has threatened legal action against Meta for its new text social network, Threads, and accuses the social networking giant of ripping off its former employees to create a copy of its app.
On Wednesday, Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger parent company) launched Threads – a mobile application that already has 30 million downloads – and a few hours later, a Twitter lawyer, Alex Spiro, sent a letter to Meta’s executive director , Mark Zuckerberg, accusing the company of engaging in a “systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property.”
“Twitter intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights and demands that Meta take immediate steps to stop using any Twitter trade secret or other highly confidential information,” Spiro wrote in a letter published Thursday by the specialized media Semafor. .
Spiro accused Meta of hiring dozens of former Twitter employees who “had and continue to have access to Twitter trade secrets.”
It further alleged that Meta tasked those employees with developing “the Meta copycat app ‘Threads’ with the specific intent of having them use Twitter trade secrets and other intellectual property to expedite the development of Meta’s competing app, in violation of state and federal laws, as well as those employees’ ongoing obligations to Twitter.”
Sapiro’s words were answered by Meta, one of whose managers told Semafor that Twitter’s accusations are unfounded and that “no one on Threads’ engineering team is a former Twitter employee” (Musk fired thousands of employees after his Twitter purchase).
Dubbed by the US media as the “Twitter killer” (Twitter killer), Threads is seen as a direct rival to the bird network created in 2006.
At first glance, Threads looks like a copy of Twitter where there are posts -photos, videos of up to 5 minutes and texts of up to 500 characters- and you can interact with them in three ways: liking them, reposting them and commenting. .
Just like on Twitter, you can enable notifications to be alerted when a user posts, but you can’t create lists with users.
Neither hashtag or tags can be used, so there are no “trending topics” or trends.
Even Meta’s own president, Mark Zuckerberg, acknowledged how similar the two applications are by tweeting -for the first time in a decade and within minutes of opening his new network- a meme of a Spider-Man pointing at another Spider-Man, image used on the Internet to indicate that something is a copy of something else.
Unlike other Twitter competitors, Meta has a lot of capital and a good user base.
According to its 2022 data, Instagram has 2,000 million monthly active users worldwide and Facebook with 2,960 million.
In addition, Instagram, along with TikTok, is one of the favorite social networks among the youngest.
It is also no coincidence that the tech giant has launched its new social network now, since since Musk’s acquisition of Twitter at the end of last year, this social network, which is mainly used by politicians and journalists, has experienced numerous technical problems. , removed the old user verification method and has been heavily criticized for the type of divisive content it promotes.
It is not the first time that Meta has taken advantage of the successful strategies of other social networks by copying their content: In 2016, Instagram launched “Stories” or stories to compete with Snapchat and in 2020 Instagram announced Reels, a short-form video feature that fight against TikTok.
