Elon Musk mocks 'the false happiness of hide-the-pain Instagram' as he sends Twitter's lawyers in on Threads
Mark Zuckerberg's Meta has launched its Twitter competitor, Threads, and Twitter owner Elon Musk is having an extremely normal one about it. Threads is top-to-bottom a Twitter copycat and is launching at a time when Twitter seems to be having a turbulent old time of it, thanks largely to Musk's fiddling ever since he took over. Now Musk's sending in the lawyers, and getting really quite petty about it.
Meta says over 30 million people have signed up to Threads (Twitter has an estimated 350 million users), and the pitch is a «friendlier» social media platform. I downloaded the app and, yeah, it is basically Twitter with a lot of people currently making jokes about not being on Twitter and discussing their favourite sodas. There are differences such as a larger character limit, and no trends or hashtags, but the look and feel are nigh-on identical.
So it's probably not surprising that Musk thinks there may be a legal angle here, with Semafore reporting that Twitter's chief lawyer Alex Spiro sent a strongly worded letter to Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday.
«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,» harrumphs Spiro. The letter goes on to accuse Meta of hiring dozens of former Twitter staff who «had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information» and were then assigned to create «Meta’s copycat 'Threads' app [using] Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property.»
The employees are mentioned because Twitter has a big problem if it wants to seriously pursue this: US copyright law does not protect ideas. So copying
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