Twitter Threatens to Sue Threads One Day After Launch — But Still Allows Links to be Tweeted
Twitter wasted little time in threatening litigation against its latest rival, firing off a letter to Threads claiming the new platform is a “copycat” app and violated Twitter’s intellectual property rights — but in contrast to their response to previous challengers, Twitter is still allowing Threads links to be posted and shared.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, launched text-based app Threads Wednesday night as Elon Musk’s management of Twitter continues to incur seemingly constant criticism. Threads benefitted from the ability for Instagram users to easily import their bios and lists of followers. Mark Zuckerberg took several victory laps as his app was deemed a “Twitter Killer” by many commentators and scooped up tens of millions of users in its first few hours.
Twitter responded Thursday with a letter from their attorneys addressed to Zuckerberg, accusing Meta of having “engaged in systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property” and of hiring “dozens of former Twitter employees” who “had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information.”
The letter goes on to state that Twitter would “strictly enforce its intellectual property rights,” demanded that Meta “take immediate steps to stop using any Twitter trade secrets or other highly confidential information” and not engage in any “crawling or scraping of Twitter’s followers or following data.” The attorneys then included language commonly used to indicate a lawsuit may follow to enforce those rights and giving “formal notice” to Meta to preserve documents.
According to a report by Max Tani at Semafor, Meta is viewing Twitter’s accusations as “baseless.”
“No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing,” a Meta source told Tani.
Regardless of the actual merits of the claims by Twitter’s legal team, the letter was “an early sign that Threads is the most serious rival yet” to Twitter, wrote Tani, noting that the bird site under Musk’s ownership was a “chaotic, but still-central” social media platform as “alternatives that have emerged such as Post.News, Mastodon, and Bluesky have failed to gain mainstream traction and large user bases.”
Meta has some key strengths in this battle, as Tani and numerous other commentators have noted, including vast financial resources and technologically-savvy staff to build a robust platform, the portability for existing Instagram users and their networks, and “long experience hobbling rivals with successful copycats.”
“Instagram Stories stopped Snapchat’s growth, while Reels is muscling through as a TikTok rival,” wrote Tani.
One tactic Musk seems to be declining to deploy so far against Threads is blocking its mentions or links on Twitter.
Last December, Twitter angered many users by not only blocking links or promotion of accounts on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Post, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, and others, but going so far as to lock the accounts of any Twitter users who posted such links. The lockdowns included several prominent journalists, including CNN’s Jim Acosta and Donie O’Sullivan, the Washington Post’s Drew Harwell, the New York Times’ Ryan Mac, and political video influencer Aaron Rupar.
At the time of publication, Twitter was still allowing links to Threads to be posted and shared. Mediaite is on both platforms as “@Mediaite,” as well as on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube under that same username.
UPDATE 3:58 pm ET: Musk tweeted about the letter his lawyers sent to Meta, writing “Competition is fine, cheating is not.”
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