Ever since Meta launched its competitor to Twitter last week, Elon Musk has been trying to take him down by denouncing Threads’ approach to content moderation, threatening a lawsuit over alleged theft of “trade secrets,” and even urging Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to do so Penis Measurement Contest.
However, some of his employees are having a lot of fun with the new app.
“I get fired for this, but I currently work at Twitter and have never really used it. Threads is just better,” a current contributor wrote on Threads last week. “Off to a new world!”
“[Not gonna lie] “The signup process was really nice,” wrote another Twitter contributor, referring to the process users use for an account.
The Daily Beast took a random sample of 133 current Twitter workers identified by their LinkedIn accounts and found that 31 of them — almost a quarter — appeared to already be in threads. Musk said in April that Twitter employed about 1,500 people, suggesting hundreds of its employees may be using the competitor.
Some of these employees may simply be sniffing out the competition. A Twitter staffer wrote that he was “here to learn things,” while another staffer’s only post was “Test 1.”
But others appeared to be there for their own amusement — or, in some cases, to berate their boss. One user rethreaded a post poking fun at Musk for the cock measurement challenge and another saying “Someone is checking Elon. He doesn’t take it well.”
Even some of Musk’s most staunch former acolytes have also turned against him. Esther Crawford, a product manager who was reportedly fired in February, once applauded Musk’s draconian leadership style. According to a , she slept on the floor at Twitter HQ in November to help him meet his deadlines tweet She happily hashtagged “SleepWhereYouWork.”
Now Crawford is railing against her old boss. “I’ve repeatedly thought it doesn’t have to be this way, and yet I continue to be disappointed that it is,” she wrote in Threads this week, referencing Musk’s Twitter overhaul. “This is what happens when a powerful person lives in an echo chamber of their own making.”
Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In a letter to Zuckerberg last week, an attorney for Twitter accused Meta of the “systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of trade secrets and other intellectual property of Twitter,” according to a copy of the note first obtained by Semafor. The letter also claimed that dozens of former Twitter employees hired by Meta facilitated the creation of his “copycat” platform. In a tweet, Musk accused Meta: “cheat.”
A meta spokesperson denied the allegations, writing: “No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing.” Meanwhile, legal experts told The Daily Beast that Twitter faces an uphill battle if it would decide to file a lawsuit.
As hundreds of Threads users also noted, Musk laid off the vast majority of his employees after taking over Twitter last year; It wouldn’t be surprising if some of them ended up in meta.
The start couldn’t have gone better for Zuckerberg. As of last weekend, more than 100 million people had signed up for Threads, making it the fastest app in history to hit that threshold. In the two days after Threads started, Twitter’s web traffic dropped 5 percent compared to the week before, according to CNBC. (Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino responded to the report in a tweet claimed the site had its best week of traffic since February.)
However, assuming Threads maintains its traction, the honeymoon period could quickly come to an end. Meta has a long history of controversy over its privacy policies, its effectiveness in eliminating disinformation, and, in the case of Instagram, its allegedly damaging effects on young people’s mental health.