Twitter threatens to sue Meta over rival app Threads – report
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witter has threatened to sue Meta over its new rival app, Threads, which launched solely a day in the past, in accordance with experiences.
News website Semafor reported on Thursday {that a} letter was despatched to Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook’s dad or mum firm Meta, by a lawyer for Twitter, Alex Spiro.
Meta launched Threads on Wednesday and has already logged greater than 30 million sign-ups. It’s trying to tackle Elon Musk’s Twitter by profiting from Instagram’s billions of customers.
“Twitter intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights, and demands that Meta take immediate steps to stop using any Twitter trade secrets or other highly confidential information,” Mr Spiro reportedly wrote within the letter.
The letter accused Meta of hiring former Twitter staff who “had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information,” in accordance with the report.
In response Meta spokesperson Andy Stone wrote on Threads: “No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing.”
Twitter had 229 million month-to-month energetic customers in May 2022, in accordance with an announcement made earlier than Mr Musk’s buyout.
But since his takeover of the social media platform, Twitter has seen competitors from Mastodon and Bluesky amongst others.
Threads’ person interface has a hanging resemblance to Twitter’s platform however Threads doesn’t assist key phrase searches or direct messages.
Dubbed because the “Twitter-Killer”, Threads was the highest free app on Apple’s App Store within the UK and the US on Thursday.
Its arrival comes after Mr Zuckerberg and Mr Musk have traded barbs for months, even threatening to combat one another in a real-life combined martial arts cage match in Las Vegas.
“The cage match has started, and Zuckerberg delivered a major blow,” Insider Intelligence principal analyst Jasmine Enberg informed Reuters.
“In many ways, it’s exactly what you’d expect from Meta: Stellar execution and an easy-to-navigate user interface.”
While Threads is a standalone app, customers can log in utilizing their Instagram particulars, which makes it a clean transition for Instagram’s greater than two billion month-to-month energetic customers.
“There should be a public conversations app with 1 billion+ people on it. Twitter has had the opportunity to do this but hasn’t nailed it. Hopefully we will,” Mr Zuckerberg stated on Threads, the place he now has one million followers.
The app doesn’t have hashtags and key phrase search features, which implies customers can not comply with real-time occasions like on Twitter. It additionally doesn’t but have a direct messaging operate or desktop model.
There are not any adverts on the Threads app and Mr Zuckerberg stated the corporate would solely take into consideration monetisation as soon as there was a transparent path to at least one billion customers.
Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino, who was employed by Musk in May to shore up advertiser confidence, stated in tweet on Thursday that “everyone’s voice matters” on the app.
“We’re often imitated – but the Twitter community can never be duplicated.”
The Standard has tried to contact Twitter, however with out success.