According to a report by Semafor, Twitter threatened to sue Meta just a day after Facebook parent company launched its Twitter-like social media app Threads.
“Competition is okay, cheating isn’t,” said Twitter’s CEO Elon Musk tweeted in response to Thursday’s report.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly received a letter from Twitter attorney Alex Spiro accusing Meta of intentionally stealing “trade secrets and other intellectual property from Twitter.”
Spiro accused Meta of getting Twitter’s secrets by hiring dozens of former Twitter employees, and claimed Facebook parent company hired them to create a Twitter copycat and use their inside knowledge to help develop the Speeding up the Threads app – which “violates both”. State and federal laws, as well as the ongoing obligations of these employees to Twitter,” Spiro said in the letter.
Meta communications director Andy Stone denied the allegations, saying in a thread that “no one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — it’s just not a thing.”
Later Friday, Instagram boss Alex Heath said in a thread that “the goal isn’t to replace Twitter,” but instead to be a “less angry place to talk.” When asked about supporting journalists and news media in Threads, Heath acknowledged that while politics and hard news would inevitably appear in Threads, “we’re not going to do anything to promote those industries.”
Threads kicked off on Wednesday, with Meta positioning the new social media app as a Twitter rival. You can log into Threads with your Instagram credentials and keep your username, followers, and verified status. Here’s everything you need to know about Thread, which Zuckerberg said hit 70 million signups as of Friday morning.
“We far exceeded our expectations,” Zuckerberg said Friday, although he noted that “we still have a lot of work to do developing the app.”
Responding to further criticism from both Musk and former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Instagram boss Adam Mosseri also said Thursday that threads will eventually get a chronological feed option.
Continue reading: Why you might not want to sign up for Threads, Meta’s new Twitter competitor