Meta’s new app Threads hit over 70 million users in its first 48 hours.
Twitter owner Elon Musk has threatened to sue Meta over its new Threads app, alleging that the company has infringed on Twitter’s “intellectual property rights”.
Threads, which Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg has candidly labelled a direct rival to Twitter, saw one of the best launches of any social media platform in history.
Amassing a user base of over 70 million people in its first 48 hours alone, the app has already proved its potential ability to disrupt Twitter’s hegemony in the social media ecosystem.
Now, following this spectacular launch, Twitter have sent Zuckerberg a letter which claims the company “has serious concerns that Meta has engaged in systematic, wilful and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property”.
With 30 million sign-ups in the first 24 hours alone, Zuckerberg’s new text-based conversation app has become the most rapidly downloaded app of all time.
Zuckerberg has been open about his ambitions for his new app to usurp Twitter. (Credit: Getty Images)Elon Musk ‘fine with competition, but not cheating’:
Speaking ahead of its launch, the social media mogul stated that Threads was an attempt at creating a “public conversations app with one billion+ people”.
In Twitter’s claims, it is alleged that Meta has poached a number of its former staff over the past year who “had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information”.
The letter sent to Zuckerberg continues by stating;
“With that knowledge, Meta deliberately assigned these employees to develop, in a matter of months, Meta’s copycat ‘Threads’ app with the specific intent that they use Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property in order to accelerate the development of Meta’s competing app”.
Twitter CEO Musk also spoke out on the matter, tweeting this week that “Competition is fine, cheating is not”.
Meta have themselves directly responded to the allegations, with Communications Director Andy Stone posting on Threads that no engineers on the design team had ever worked at Twitter.
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