Threads is the name of the new social network launched by Meta this week under the umbrella of Instagram and due to the first successful data, reaching 30 million downloads in the first 24 hours. But as expected in a “Twitter clone” there will be a legal battle with a prominent train crash: Elon Musk vs. Mark Zuckerberg.
Meta (formerly Facebook) has taken advantage of the bad moment of Twitter to launch a new social network that clearly wants to occupy the space lost by the microblogging site. Twitter has lost users and income after the acquisition of Elon Musk and his peculiar management. 70 percent of its staff have been fired or resigned, representing a loss of talent, and a portion of advertisers have fled the platform as hate speech, trolls, and the lack of that “democracy” have continued to thrive. » of which Musk boasted when he took office.
The new CEO, Linda Yaccarino, should be a shock, but the troubles are piling up, the last one being the limitation of messages that ordinary users can see on a daily basis. And now we have a legal battle. Twitter is afraid of Threads, and for good reason. Although there were already alternatives in microblogging such as Mastodon, Meta is a great danger for Musk due to the hundreds of millions of users that it may accumulate.
Does Threads use Twitter trade secrets?
Alex Spiro, a lawyer for Twitter, has accused Mark Zuckerberg and Meta of hiring dozens of Twitter employees to create Threads “with the specific intent” of use your privileged information to develop the new service. The lawyer assures that the ex-employees of Twitter “continue to have access to Twitter trade secrets and have inappropriately withheld Twitter documents and electronic devices”.
The letter requires Meta to immediately stop using “any Twitter trade secrets” since the facebook matrix has “expressly prohibited from removing any of the Twitter followers or following data”. Spiro ends up threatening legal action: “Twitter reserves all rights, including, without limitation, the right to seek civil remedies and injunctive relief without notice to prevent Meta from further withholding, disclosing, or using its intellectual property.”.
Meta’s head of communications has denied that his engineering team has any former Twitter employees and it will certainly be difficult to prove insider trading, but the case is likely to wind up in court.
If Twitter is in trouble, so is Meta. It is not the first time that it has taken advantage of successful features from rivals on social networks, such as when in 2016 Instagram launched “Stories” or stories to compete with Snapchat and in 2020 Reels, a short-form video feature that clearly copies TikTok.
In addition, Threads is not available in any country of the European Union as it does not comply with data protection regulations. The case is going long.
