Twitter has responded to the presentation by Meta of Threads, the new social network with which the technology giant intends to compete with the company that controls Elon Musk. The tycoon has threatened through one of his lawyers to sue Mark Zuckerberg’s company for appropriation of trade secrets and intellectual property.
The attempted lawsuit has been made through a letter addressed to the owner of Meta Platforms, in which Alex Spiro, the Quinn Emanuel law firm represents X Corp (Musk’s technology company and successor to Twitter, Inc. since 2023) and accuses Zuckerberg of having developed Threads through a “systematic misappropriation” of Twitter’s intellectual property.
The basis of these accusations of appropriation is that, according to Spiro, Zuckerberg hired former Twitter employees to develop the new application that joins Whatsapp, Instagram and Facebook among those belonging to the Meta group, and that from X Corp they have classified as “imitation”.
Musk calls for immediate action from Meta
In this sense, it accuses Meta of seeking to accelerate the development of ‘Threads’ through the use of Twitter trade secrets and other intellectual property “in violation of state and federal laws, as well as the obligations of those employees with Twitter “.
Thus, the letter warns that 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.
“Twitter reserves all rights, including, among others, the right to seek civil and injunctive relief without further notice to prevent Meta from retaining, disclosing, or further using its intellectual property,” the lawyer warns in his letter, to which He first had access to the American publication ‘Semafor’.
Threads has an ‘interface’ very similar to that of Twitter and its operation is also the same. That is, you can create short text posts, in which you can develop conversion threads and limit who responds to those posts.
Although Threads is a completely independent platform, it is related to Instagram. So much so, that to navigate through it, the same user account is used as in said social network. In fact, the same username and profile photo are used.
Based on this, Threads has an option that allows users to automatically follow the same accounts that were previously on Instagram. In the event that any of these accounts are not yet in Threads, they are shown as pending to join and, in the event that they are private, a follow-up request is provided.
In the same way, users with a private profile can also configure if their Instagram followers can also follow them in Threads automatically or if, on the contrary, only some specific accounts can do so. As for users under the age of 16, they will have a default private profile.
As Instagram has explained in a statement on its blog, users will be able to create text posts of up to 500 characters and include links, photos and videos of up to 5 minutes in length. Thus, the main ‘feed’ will consist of threads published by the accounts that are followed and recommended content from new creators. Likewise, the platform has detailed that a Threads publication can be “easily” shared in Instagram stories or as a link on any other platform.
On the other hand, another of the characteristics of Threads is that it is an open space that will be able to connect to other decentralized social networks such as Mastodon, since it will integrate the ActivityPub protocol, although not at the time of its launch. As they have specified, they are still working to make it compatible with open and interoperable social networks that “can shape the future of the Internet.”
