With already more than thirty million accounts since its launch, Mark Zuckerberg’s new Threads social network is strongly shaking up its rival Twitter. What provoke the sarcasm of the owner of the blue bird Elon Musk who threatens, since this Thursday, July 6, to attack Meta in justice.
On Thursday, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Threads parent company Meta, made no secret of his excitement: “Looks like the start of something great, but we still have a lot of work ahead of us to build” what’s on display. like Instagram’s “text chat app”.
Earlier, he had launched a spade at his rival Elon Musk: “It will take time but I think there should be a conversations app with at least a billion people on it. Twitter had the opportunity to do that but did not succeed. We hope to get there”.
To a tweet from a user who thought the Threads logo “look(s) like a tapeworm,” Twitter’s majority shareholder commented, “Metaphorically too,” likening the new platform to a parasite. . He also reacted with a laughing crying emoji at the tweet from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey saying, “We wanted flying cars. Instead, we got seven Twitter clones.”
Meta accused of recruiting “dozens” of ex-Twitter employees
But the hot-headed billionaire didn’t just laugh, sending a letter through the attorney for Twitter’s parent company, X Corp, accusing Meta of breaching trade secrets and copyright infringement. intellectual property. Facebook parent company accused of recruiting “dozens” of ex-Twitter employees according to the document published by the information site Semafor.
“These employees had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information. […] Many of these employees have inappropriately kept documents and electronic devices from Twitter”, can we read in this letter, which assures that Threads is a “copy of Twitter”. Meta would have hired talents among the approximately 5,000 employees who have left Elon Musk’s social network since 2022 (around 75% of the workforce).
Giving Meta formal notice to cease its actions, X Corp said it was ready to take legal action if it did not. “Competition is not a problem. Cheating is one”, denounced Elon Musk on Twitter.
“No member of the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone responded on the new social network.
Twitter setbacks
The publication of Threads comes a few days after new adventures at Twitter, already weakened by a series of unwelcome decisions since its takeover by Elon Musk – transformation into a paid service for verifying an account or dismissal of the quasi -all of the content moderation teams.
The billionaire announced on Saturday the establishment, officially on a provisional basis, of a limit to the number of messages that can be consulted per account and per day. On Monday, Twitter revealed that the TweetDeck dashboard would soon only be accessible to verified, therefore paying, accounts.
Will Threads succeed, in the coming months, in taking advantage of Twitter’s setbacks to supplant it? Elon Musk’s social network “is seriously injured and Threads could deal it another major blow,” Jasmine Enberg, an analyst at Insider Intelligence, told AFP. “Twitters are desperate for an alternative and Musk has presented Zuckerberg with an opportunity.” The only big downside: Meta has chosen to wait before offering Threads in the European Union while it clarifies the consequences of the new digital market regulations (DMA), which came into force in early May, according to a source familiar with the matter.