Elon Musk threatens lawsuit as Twitter rival Threads takes off

Just hours after Instagram’s parent company debuted Threads, an app it thinks will outperform the faltering site owned by Elon Musk, Twitter threatened to sue Meta.

Elon Musk threatens lawsuit: Musk attorney Alex Spiro accused Meta of “unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property” in a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg that was released by online news source Semafor on Thursday.

The accusation in the letter was that Meta had employed a large number of former Twitter workers who “had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information.”

Though a number of prospective rivals have emerged for Musk-owned Twitter, one of the largest social media networks in the world hasn’t yet been replaced, thanks to Threads.

The recent move by Zuckerberg against Musk has intensified their animosity even more; the two billionaires have even agreed to face off in a cage battle for hand-to-hand combat.

At 2300 GMT on Wednesday, Threads became live on Apple and Android app stores across 100 countries. Early reaction recognised its similarity to Twitter, but trimmed back.

More than 30 million individuals had downloaded Threads in a short period of time, according to Zuckerberg on Thursday.

It “feels like the beginning of something special, but we’ve got a lot of work ahead to build app,” Zuckerberg commented on his official Threads account.

Celebrities like Hugh Jackman, Jennifer Lopez, Shakira, Oprah Winfrey, and The Washington Post all have active accounts, as did The Economist and The Washington Post.

“I think there should be a public conversations app with 1 billion+ people on it,” wrote Mark Zuckerberg.

Twitter has had the chance to achieve this, but it hasn’t succeeded. I think we will.

“Twitter Reports Over 200 Million Daily Users as Elon Musk Comments on Threads and Potential Legal Action”

According to Twitter, there are more than 200 million users every day.

In the meantime, Musk posted a picture that said the Threads logo looked like a tapeworm. “Metaphorically too,” he affirmed.

Regarding Twitter’s prospective legal action against Meta, Musk stated in another post that “competition is fine, cheating is not.”

On Threads, a representative for Meta, Andy Stone, stated: “No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee – that’s just not a thing.”

“Be nice”

As an Instagram spin-off, Threads was established, saving the new platform the difficulty of beginning from scratch and giving it an audience of more than two billion users right out of the gate.

Threads’ goal, according to Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri, is to create “an open and friendly platform for conversations.”

The finest action you can take if you want it as well is kindness, he advised.

In order to promote the new tool, which Meta hopes will become the go-to platform for celebrities, businesses, and politicians, Zuckerberg is taking advantage of Musk’s erratic ownership of Twitter.

Threads just needs one out of every four monthly Instagram users, according to analyst Jasmine Engberg of Insider Intelligence, “to make it as big as Twitter.”

“Twitter users are desperate for an alternative, and Musk has given Zuckerberg an opening,” she continued.

Under Musk, Twitter’s content moderation has been drastically scaled back, with malfunctions and hasty choices driving away big-name personalities and advertisers.

Additionally, he let go of more than half of Twitter’s workforce, some of whom presumably joined Meta or other digital firms.

‘Many months’ until the EU

Additionally, Meta has a large number of detractors, particularly in the important European market, which can hinder Threads’ expansion.

The business has come under fire for how it manages customer information, which is necessary for the targeted advertising that generates the company’s enormous profits.

Despite the need for legislative clarification from Brussels, Mosseri expressed disappointment that the European Union had to postpone the debut of Threads, which would have taken “many, many, many months” if Meta had waited.

A source with direct knowledge of the situation claims that Meta was leery of the Digital Markets Act (DMA), a recent regulation that establishes stringent guidelines for the global “gatekeeper” internet corporations.

One restriction prohibits platforms from transferring user data between services, which would apply between Threads and Instagram.

Users globally have made three million tweets using the Threads hashtag, with many sarcastically speculating that users will return to Musk’s site.

Others voiced concerns about privacy.

A Japanese user wrote, “Meta loves to collect private information and I don’t trust the way it treats private information.”

“I’m reluctant because I also get the feeling that EU despises this company.”

Some, though, declared they would permanently switch to Threads.

As one Threads user put it, “Now I can truly say goodbye to Twitter forever.”