Featured Image Credit: Chesnot/Getty Images/Aurelien Meunier/Getty Image
Topics: World News, Elon Musk, Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook, Technology, Social Media
Tom Wood
Topics: World News, Elon Musk, Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook, Technology, Social Media
Elon Musk appears to have confirmed the rumours that Twitter is taking legal action against Meta because of Threads, their new social media platform.
In case you missed it, Mark Zuckerberg has recently launched a new platform that bears a pretty striking resemblance to Twitter, leading many to consider it as an alternative.
Threads came out on July 6, receiving 30 million sign-ups already across 100 countries, according to Meta.
Basically, it works in the same way as Twitter – you sign up and you can post content, like and share other people’s content, and follow others.
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The company says that it wants to ‘take what Instagram does best and expand that to text’.
That’s fair enough, but it even looks a wee bit like Twitter, which should at least make it easy for new users to navigate.
However, Musk and Twitter aren’t happy, and a letter – obtained by Semafor – suggests that the company has ‘serious concerns’ that Meta and Zuckerberg have ‘engaged in systematic, wilful and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property'.
The lawyer for Twitter, Alex Spiro, added: "Twitter intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights, and demands that Meta take immediate steps to stop using any Twitter trade secrets or other highly confidential information."
Now, Musk himself has commented on the matter, responding to a tweet about that letter with a short statement.
He wrote: “Competition is fine, cheating is not.”
Those are fighting words, if ever we’ve heard them.
Many people have expressed their frustration with what is happening at Twitter since Musk took over.
First, there was the whole blue tick debacle, and more recently there have been suggestions that he’s planning to restrict the number of tweets that non-paying users can see in a day.
It’s causing people to think about moving to other platforms, with BlueSky and Mastodon also available.
Now, Zuckerberg has stepped into the market as well.
Speaking of ‘stepping in’ to things, this latest legal fight is just one planned fight between the two billionaires.
The pair have been rattling sabres over stepping into the octagon with one another for a cage fight, given that both have been training martial arts.
Musk recently said on Twitter that he’d be ‘up for a cage fight’ if Zuckerberg was.
The Facebook head honcho has agreed that he’d be keen for it as well, and even UFC Chief Dana White has said that the pair are ‘dead serious’ about getting it done.
White said: "Both guys are absolutely dead serious about this. They both want to do it. Mark Zuckerberg hit me up first and said, 'Is he serious?'
"And I said, 'I don't know, let me ask him,' and I asked him and he said, 'yeah, I'm dead serious'. It would break all pay-per-view records."
UNILAD has reached out to Meta for a comment, and we did reach out to Twitter as well, but they just sent back a poop emoji - as per usual.