Twitter to sue Meta and Threads

Threads, Meta's new text-based application, was launched in app stores around the world - except for Europe, for now, intent on resolving data protection issues - only yesterday, but it has already sparked angst at Twitter. Created to entice young people to approach the world of Meta now undermined by Chinese social media rival TikTok and Musk's, Threads' interface is strikingly similar to Twitter's, a fact that has recently inspired an endless series of memes on both home pages. According to Semafor, a few hours after the launch of the new app, a Twitter lawyer emailed Mark Zuckerberg claiming that Meta had used Elon Musk's social media intellectual property systematically. 

Why does Elon Musk want to sue Meta?

«Twitter intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights and demands that Meta take immediate steps to stop using any of Twitter's trade secrets or other highly confidential information,» reads the email from attorney Alex Spiro, «Twitter reserves all rights, including but not limited to the right to seek civil remedies and injunctive relief without further notice to prevent any further retention, disclosure or use of its intellectual property by Meta.» The indictment highlights Twitter's assumption that Meta hired numerous former Twitter employees to use their expertise to make the Threads format as similar as possible to Twitter's, a violation, Spiro makes clear in the email, of state and federal laws. When questioned by the source who obtained this exclusive news, Twitter communications director Andy Stone denied the allegations, while Musk tweeted «Competition is fine, cheating is not.»

What is Threads?

Created in 2019 to counter Snapchat, later abandoned, and now completely revolutionized, Threads is entirely dedicated to text rather than images. Among the features that make clear the similarity between this new app and Twitter are the ability to repost and that of adding comments with entire photo galleries, and a detail that would seem to be a dig: the name of Meta's new app, Threads, is the term used on Twitter to describe a series of interconnected Tweets, one of the most frequently used words in the vocabulary of creators of Musk's social. At the moment, the app is not yet available in Italy and European countries.