- Twitter has threatened legal action against Meta over concerns about the rapidly-growing Threads app.
- According to Twitter, Meta has used confidential information after hiring Twitter’s ex-employees to create the new app.
- The Threads app has already reached more than 30 million downloads and is not showing any signs of slowing.
Since its launch on Wednesday, Meta’s new app, Threads, has gained over 30 million downloads surpassing even ChatGPT. Following its launch, Twitter’s legal team sent a cease-and-desist letter to Meta, accusing the company of misappropriating intellectual property and trade secrets after hiring Twitter ex-employees with confidential information. It also warned Meta against scraping data from Twitter’s platform.
Elon Musk tweeted about the letter saying, “Competition is fine; cheating is not.†According to Twitter’s lawyer Alex Spiro, Meta has hired dozens of Twitter employees, many of whom have allegedly retained Twitter’s electronic devices and documents, including highly confidential data.
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone has refuted these claims saying that none of the people on the Threads development team were former Twitter employees. Threads is viewed as the top competitor to Twitter, which has been floating in controversy ever since it was bought by Musk in 2022 for $44 billion.
See More: Instagram Owner Meta Develops an Alternative to Twitter
Twitter Faces Danger From Multiple Competitors
The legal threat will only further inflame tensions between the social media leaders. In addition, the new app is also facing privacy concerns. For instance, Threads is not available in the European Union, possibly due to its strict regulations on data privacy.
While Twitter’s attention is fixed on the Threads threat, it is not the only competition trying to leverage Twitter’s problems. Mastodon, for instance, simplified its signup process to eliminate confusion arising from its decentralized structure and has gained approximately 8 million users since late 2022.
Furthermore, after Twitter announced a move to limit the number of posts each account can see daily, another prominent competitor Bluesky saw record-high traffic flowing its way, resulting in degraded performance on the platform, which is still in its beta phase.
Bluesky also announced that it had raised $8 million in funding over the summer and launched a paid service for custom domains for end users. These announcements are likely to be headaches for Musk’s Twitter going forward.
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