2023-07-06 19:56:00
According to a media report, Twitter is threatening the Facebook group Meta with a lawsuit because of the rival app Threads that has just been launched. A Twitter lawyer accused Meta in a letter of “having used confidential information and internal knowledge of the short message service for threads,” wrote the website Semafor on Thursday and published a copy of the letter.
In it, Twitter lawyer Alex Spiro claims, among other things, that Meta hired dozens of ex-employees of the short message service who had confidential internal information. Twitter owner Elon Musk has laid off thousands of employees since taking over the company last October. Many of them found new jobs at other tech companies.
In the meantime, the allegations have been rejected at Meta, reports Semafor. No former Twitter employees would work on the Threads development team, it said.
Ten million users already
The “Twitter copy” of Meta soon has more than ten million users. Threads hit the mark seven hours following launch, Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg wrote on Thursday. Threads docks with Meta’s Instagram photo and video platform and is available in the US and over 100 other countries – but not in the European Union. The group refers to open questions in regulation.
Instagram boss Adam Mosseri indicated in interviews that the new EU regulations with the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act, which will take effect in the coming year, were a hurdle. The laws contain strict requirements for large online platforms. In the industry blog “Platformer”, Mosseri defended the decision to start without users in Germany and other EU countries. The choice was between leaving them out or “delaying the launch for many, many, many months,” he said. “And I was worried that the window would close for us.”
Twitter in crisis
Threads’ launch follows a particularly turbulent day for Twitter, which has been troubled since it was taken over by tech billionaire Elon Musk. The short message service angered users over the weekend with a drastic cap on the number of tweets they can see per day for free. After Threads launched, Musk was defiant: it’s infinitely better to be attacked by strangers on Twitter than to indulge in the “false bliss” of Instagram.
The connection to Instagram is considered a significant starting advantage for threads. Because Meta can use it for its Twitter copy right from the start on existing connections between more than a billion users. Twitter hasn’t had any user numbers since Musk took over, the short message service used to have more than 300 million users.
Instagram users can easily apply their profile to the photo app for threads. Text posts on threads can be up to 500 characters long and can contain links, photos, and videos up to five minutes long. When Twitter was launched in 2006, the text limit was originally 140 characters and was later doubled to 280 characters.
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