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Threads, Meta’s new ‘Twitter killer,’ is up, active and might get Zuckerberg sued

Stephen Council

Threads, the newest app within Meta’s omnipresent social media empire, is officially online — and Twitter is reportedly not too happy.

Elon Musk’s lawyer Alex Spiro sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg hours after Threads’ launch on Wednesday, Semafor reported, writing that Twitter has concerns that Meta “has engaged in systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property.” The letter includes the accusation that the Bay Area tech giant hired former Twitter employees and used confidential trade secrets to accelerate Threads’ development.

“Twitter intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights,” Spiro wrote, demanding that Meta preserve documents that might be relevant to a potentially forthcoming legal dispute. Meta communications director Andy Stone refuted the claim in a Threads post: “No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing.”

The new platform looks and feels like Twitter, with a vertical feed of text-based posts that can be replied to, quoted and reposted. Posts can be up to 500 characters long and include links, photos and videos. 

Unlike the other Twitter-esque sites that have launched in recent years (and proliferated after Elon Musk’s tumultuous takeover), Threads comes with a built-in social network: After signing on with a required Instagram account, new Threads users are given a one-tap option to follow everyone they follow on the photo-sharing app. 

As users poured onto Threads after Wednesday evening’s launch, a familiar pattern of power users emerged: Both Olivia Rodrigo and Stephen Curry already have over 600,000 Threads followers. Zuckerberg has 1.3 million, Netflix has 1.1 million. (Anecdotally, it seems plenty are taking this option — a flood of high school acquaintances have already refollowed this reporter.) 

Zuckerberg said that 30 million people had signed up as of Wednesday morning, a hundredth of Meta’s 3 billion daily active users in March. The Menlo Park-based tech company now runs Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads and headset-maker Oculus.

Instagram workers started pitching ideas for a Twitter rival late last year, the New York Times reported, bandying about concepts like an expansion of the message feature Instagram Notes. The company has a track record with successful product imitations, including Stories from Snapchat, live video with features akin to the late Periscope, and Reels, a direct answer to TikTok.

San Francisco-based Twitter has seen a spell of struggles in the past half-year, including a recent “rate limit” snafu, low adoption of its new “blue check” product, and scores of advertiser departures. In June, a top safety executive left the firm — the second since Musk’s takeover — after Musk complained about how the platform handled transgender topics. Still, Meta’s “Twitter killer,” as the Times calls it, faces an uphill battle to wrest user time and habits from the existing platform.

Twitter’s new CEO, Linda Yaccarino, seemed to respond to Threads’ launch Thursday morning, tweeting to her almost half a million followers. “YOU built the Twitter community,” she wrote. “... And that’s irreplaceable. This is your public square. We’re often imitated -- but the Twitter community can never be duplicated.”

New Threads users will find a home feed full of verified brands and influencers, some of whom got early access to the platform. Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri said a following-only feed is on the list of future features, but a Meta spokesperson declined to provide a timeline. 

It’s also unclear whether verification, which accounts can buy for $11.99, boosts visibility and reach on Threads. That was an initial selling point for Meta Verified on Instagram when the company started testing the product early this year.

“Feels like the beginning of something special, but we’ve got a lot of work ahead to build out the app,” Zuckerberg wrote in his post Thursday morning. For now, just underneath “Post to feed” on Threads posts’ share options, there’s an ironic choice: “Tweet.”