Instagram parent company Meta has introduced Threads, which is now being called the “Twitter killer” platform. It is also called the “copycat” application. Thus, Twitter is now threatening to take legal action against Meta for introducing a similar app called Threads.
Alex Spiro, a lawyer for Twitter has sent a letter to Mark Zuckerberg and has accused the company of “systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property.” He has also accused Mark of hiring former Twitter employees who knew the trade secrets of Twitter and had access to highly confidential information. Musk claims that those employees were asked to develop “Threads” with the intent of copying Twitter and using Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property. This has led to the violation of state and federal law, as well as the employee’s obligations to Twitter. This can not only cause serious consequences for Zuckerberg but also for the former employees of Twitter.
This has led to a war between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. According to Twitter, “Twitter reserves all rights, including, but not limited to, the right to seek both civil remedies and injunctive relief without further notice to prevent any further retention, disclosure, or use of its intellectual property by Meta.” Elon Musk claims that he has complete autonomy and rights over the idea of Twitter and any breach of the copyright will lead to severe consequences for Mark Zuckerberg.
“Twitter intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights, and demands that Meta take immediate steps to stop using any Twitter trade secrets or other highly confidential information”.
Zuckerberg on Thursday, announced that 30 million users have already signed up for threads. Andy Stone, who is a Meta communications director, has called Twitter’s accusations baseless. He said that “No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing”. In reply to this, Musk tweeted and said, Competition is fine, cheating is not”. Since the past year after Musk bought Twitter, a lot of people have complained about the degraded user experience and Musk’s rightward political tilt on Twitter. Despite all this criticism, the alternatives that have emerged such as Bluesky, Mastodon, and Post News have failed to attract user bases.
Thus, Threads can prove to be a serious threat to Twitter as it can take away its user bases and dollars from Twitter. Threads also let you interact directly with your Instagram followers, whereas, on Twitter, you have to build your followers from scratch. Meta has been handling copyright issues since long when Instagram stories took over Snapchat stories and Instagram reels took over Tiktok.
Nathan Baschez argues that the future looks fragmented as there will be no single dominant platform. She says that there will be a shift of users on the internet towards threads from Twitter. “There will be no next Twitter, but there will be a shift toward an internet that looks more like it did before Twitter and Facebook became dominant”.
