The battle between Elon Musk’s Twitter and Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta over the launch of Threads — Instagram’s Twitter rival — has taken a legal turn.

On Wednesday, Meta’s Instagram debuted Threads, a text-focused social app designed to piggyback off Instagram’s infrastructure and user base. The app had more than 30 million sign-ups as of Thursday morning, according to Zuckerberg, which would represent around 1.5% of Instagram’s monthly active users.

In a July 5 cease-and-desist letter addressed to Meta CEO Zuckerberg, a lawyer representing Twitter said that Musk’s company had “serious concerns” that Meta “has engaged in systematic, willful and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property.” The letter said that “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.”

“Over the past year, Meta has hired dozens of Twitter employees,” the letter says, alleging that “Meta deliberately assigned these employees to develop, in a matter of months, Meta’s copycat ‘Threads’ app with the specific intent that they use Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property in order to accelerate the development of Meta’s competing app, in violation of both state and federal laws as well as those employees’ ongoing obligations to Twitter.”

Meta spokesperson Andy Stone, asked for comment, referred to his post on Threads that said, “No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing.”

Musk, in a tweet responding to news of Twitter’s legal threat to Meta, said, “Competition is fine, cheating is not.”

Twitter’s cease-and-desist letter also says that “Meta is expressly prohibited from engaging in any crawling or scraping of Twitter’s followers or follower data… Scraping any Twitter services is expressly prohibited for any reason without Twitter’s prior consent.” However, the letter does not allege that Meta engaged in such activity.

The letter from Twitter’s law firm to Meta was first reported by Semafor.

Musk acquired Twitter in a $44 billion deal in October 2022. Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino, who started at the social media company last month after exiting NBCUniversal, on Thursday posted a tweet seemingly referring to Threads, in which she said in part, “We’re often imitated — but the Twitter community can never be duplicated.”

An email to Twitter’s PR account requesting info returned an autoreply with a poop emoji. Variety also reached out to Alex Spiro, a partner with Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, the law firm representing Twitter (officially renamed as X Corp.) but has not received a reply.

. Variety

Facebook has tried to compete with Twitter in numerous ways over the years, including copying signature Twitter features such as hashtags and trending topics. But now Facebook’s parent company is taking perhaps its biggest swipe at Twitter yet.

Meta on Wednesday officially launched a new app called Threads, which is intended to offer a space for real-time conversations online, a function that has long been Twitter’s core selling point.

The app received 10 million sign-ups within seven hours of its launch, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on his verified Threads account.

The app appears to have many similarities to Twitter, from the layout to the product description. The listing, which first appeared earlier this week as a teaser, emphasizes its potential to build a following and connect with like-minded people.

“The vision for Threads is to create an option and friendly public space for conversation,” Zuckerberg said in a Threads post following the launch. “We hope to take what Instagram does best and create a new experience around text, ideas, and discussing what’s on your mind.”

He also responded to posts and shared his thoughts on whether Threads will ever be bigger than Twitter.

“It’ll take some time, but I think there should be a public conversations app with 1 billion+ people on it. Twitter has had the opportunity to do this but hasn’t nailed it,” Zuckerberg wrote on Threads. “Hopefully we will.”

The app’s listing describes it as a place where communities can come together to discuss everything from the topics they care about today to what’s trending.

“Whatever it is you’re interested in, you can follow and connect directly with your favorite creators and others who love the same things — or build a loyal following of your own to share your ideas, opinions and creativity with the world,” it reads.

Meta said messages posted to Threads will have a 500 character limit. The company said it was bringing the app to 100 countries via Apple’s iOS and Android.

After downloading the app, users are asked to link up their Instagram page, customize their profile and follow the same accounts they already follow on Instagram. The look is similar to Twitter with a familiar layout, text-based feed, the ability to repost and quote other Thread posts. But it also blends Instagram’s existing aesthetic and offers the ability to share posts from Threads directly to Instagram Stories. Verified Instagram accounts are also automatically verified on Threads. Thread accounts can also be listed as public or private.

The new app joins a growing list of Twitter rivals and could pose the biggest threat to Twitter of the bunch, given Meta’s vast resources and its massive audience.

It also comes amid heightened turmoil at Twitter, which experienced an outage over the weekend, followed by an announcement that the site had imposed temporary limits on how many tweets its users are able to read while using the app.

.CNN

Elon Musk said late Tuesday that he plans on remaining as Twitter’s CEO until he can find someone willing to replace him in the job.

Musk’s announcement came after just over 57 per cent of responses indicated that he should step down from the role, in an unscientific poll the billionaire himself created and promised to abide by the past weekend.

“I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job!” Musk tweeted. “After that, I will just run the software & servers teams.”

Since taking over San Francisco-based Twitter in late October, Musk’s run as CEO has been marked by quickly issued rules and policies that have often been withdrawn or changed soon after being made public.

Twitter users vote yes to Elon Musk’s poll of whether he should step down as CEO

He has also alienated some investors in his electric vehicle company Tesla who are concerned that Twitter is taking too much of his attention.

“The first weeks of Mr. Musk’s Twitter ownership have raised questions about possible violations of securities or other laws, including whether Mr. Musk is funnelling Tesla resources into Twitter,” Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren said in a letter, made public, to Robyn Denholm, Tesla’s board chair.

READ  ALSO: Mass Sacking As Elon Musk Completes Takeover Of Twitter

Tumultuous first weeks Some of Musk’s actions have unnerved Twitter advertisers and turned off users. They include laying off half of Twitter’s workforce, letting go contract content moderators and disbanding a council of trust and safety advisors that the company formed in 2016 to address hate speech, child exploitation, suicide, self-harm and other problems on the platform.

Musk, who also helms the SpaceX rocket company, has previously acknowledged how difficult it will be to find someone to take over as Twitter CEO.

On Sunday, Twitter owner Elon Musk joined comedian Dave Chappelle on stage and was roundly booed. Musk responded on Twitter saying, “Technically, it was 90% cheers,” and that “It’s almost as if I’ve offended SF’s unhinged leftists … but nahhh.”

Musk has said that he’s politically a centrist, but the tweet is just one recent example of how he’s adopted partisan language in a social media culture war. Musk has distributed Twitter records that are supposed to reveal biased censorship, indulged in far-right talking points about COVID-19 and unbanned white nationalist accounts.

Bantering with Twitter followers last Sunday, he said that the person replacing him “must like pain a lot” to run a company that he said has been “in the fast lane to bankruptcy.”

“No one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive. There is no successor,” Musk tweeted.

As things stand, Musk would still retain overwhelming influence over platform as its owner. He fired the company’s board of directors soon after taking control.

.CBC

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