Just a few hours after the release of Threads, an app that Instagram’s parent company developed to compete with Elon Musk’s underperforming platform, Twitter became quite upset and threatened to sue Meta.
Musk’s 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 made public on Thursday by the online news source Semafor.
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.”
Threads is the largest competitor to Musk-owned Twitter yet. Despite its difficulties, Twitter has seen a number of prospective rivals emerge, but they have not yet been able to displace one of the largest social media sites in the world.
The recent action taken by Zuckerberg against Musk fueled their ongoing conflict, which has progressed to the point where they’ve decided to engage in cage-match hand-to-hand combat. Additionally, Zuckerberg shared a meme of Spider-Man pointing at Spider-Man in his first tweet in more than ten years, ostensibly alluding to the parallels between Threads and Twitter.
At 23:00 GMT on Wednesday, Threads became available on Apple and Android app stores in 100 different countries. Early reviews noticed Threads’ similarity to Twitter, but on a smaller scale. 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 the app,” Zuckerberg said on his official Threads account on Thursday.
Celebrities like Jennifer Lopez, Shakira, and Hugh Jackman, along with media outlets like The Washington Post and The Economist, had already created accounts on Threads.
In a post on Threads, Zuckerberg expressed his vision of having a public conversations app with over 1 billion people, although he acknowledged it might take some time to achieve.
Meanwhile, Twitter boasts of having over 200 million daily users.
