Twitter Threatens to Sue Meta Over Threads
On Wednesday, Twitter threatened legal action against Threads — the same day that Meta’s new rival social media app was released.
Facts
- On Wednesday, Twitter threatened legal action against Threads — the same day that Meta’s new rival social media app was released.1
- Alex Spiro, an attorney for Twitter, sent a letter to Meta Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Mark Zuckerberg accusing his company of hiring many former Twitter employees in order to illegally leverage Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property and create a “copycat” app.2
- Upon purchasing Twitter last year, Elon Musk, who’s also the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, fired close to 80% of Twitter's staff, leaving the platform with less than 600 engineers.3
- Twitter under Musk has reduced its content-moderation rules and started to charge $8 per month for users who want verification — changes that have created controversy and inspired other companies to attempt to create a competing platform.3
- Zuckerberg, whose company built Threads off the existing Instagram app, said around 70M users had signed up for Threads as of Friday.4
Sources: 1NPR Online News, 2Time, 3Business Insider, and 4ABC News.
Narratives
- Right narrative, as provided by Red State. Musk should do what he can to stop Threads from being a carbon copy of Twitter, but he shouldn’t worry about the Meta-owned platform challenging Twitter’s supremacy. While Musk has made Twitter a bastion of free speech, there’s already a ton of censorship going on at Threads in its infant moments — sensitive celebrities and other woke leftists can’t stand for opposing opinions. As far as a real public square, Twitter will always be the place to be.
- Left narrative, as provided by New York Times. Musk knows that the issue isn't his former employees working on Threads — he’s truly worried about facing competition. What’s happening at Threads isn’t censorship, it’s hands-on content management to keep the new platform from being overrun by hate speech and misinformation the way Twitter has been since Musk’s takeover. People have been yearning for a robust and viable alternative to Twitter for numerous reasons and now they have it.
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