“Competition is good, cheating is not”: Twitter threatens to sue Meta after the launch of Threads

A duel that could be settled in court. After the launch of the Threads application by Meta, Twitter was quick to react to this new competitor. The American newspaper Semafor reveals that Alex Spiro, the lawyer for the blue bird social network, would have sent a threatening email to Mark Zuckerberg. Said email accuses the CEO and his teams of "deliberate and illegal misappropriation of trade secrets and other intellectual property of Twitter" and of having, in short, plagiarized Twitter.

Launched Wednesday evening, the Threads application, linked to Instagram, was directly designed to compete with Twitter. This new service allows users to share and write messages of up to 500 characters, with the possibility of including links, photos or even videos, lasting up to five minutes. All on a very similar interface.

A point that has not escaped the lawyer of the social network. In the following email, Twitter even accuses Meta of having recruited dozens of former employees fired by Twitter since its takeover by Elon Musk last October. Employees who continue, according to the words of the email, "to have access to Twitter's trade secrets and other highly confidential information".

Twitter even suspects Meta of having instructed the employees in question to develop Threads with “the specific intention that they use the trade secrets in question in order to accelerate the development of the competing application”, reports the Semafor newspaper. "In violation of federal and state laws, as well as these employees' ongoing obligations to Twitter." For its part, a source close to Meta ensures that the accusations from Twitter are baseless.

A reaction that comes after the resounding launch of Threads. In less than a day, the social network recorded nearly 30 million registrations. According to data from Visibrain, a platform specializing in web and social media monitoring, Threads already has more than 7 million messages published since last night, four times more than on Instagram and six times more than on TikTok.

The social network therefore presents itself as a credible rival at a time when Twitter continues to tire Internet users. Recently, for example, the social network announced that it would limit the reading of Tweets and gain access to its paid TweetDeck software within thirty days, causing a public outcry. A fragility, which could contribute to the success of a competing service like Threads.

On Twitter, Elon Musk did not fail to relay the accusations against his rival, Mark Zuckerberg. "Competition is good, cheating is not," he tweeted. For several weeks, the tension has been rising between the two entrepreneurs, who provoke each other through social networks and even threaten to come to blows in an arena.