If you’re on Twitter, you’re likely already up to date with Elon Musk’s various missteps as Twitter’s owner and ‘Chief Twit’. He’s run the company into the ground, made the platform terrible for users, and in his most recent move, rate-limited tweets so that users could only see a certain number of tweets per day. This has since been silently reversed, but it was the straw that broke the camel’s back for many. People have been fleeing to alternative platforms ever since, convinced that Twitter will never regain its functionality. Threads is one of those platforms, and while I have serious issues with its privacy policy and its overall terrible vibes, it seems a whole lot more functional than Twitter.
It’s likely because it’s the most accessible, popular Twitter competitor that Musk is threatening to sue them, with Twitter’s lawyer Alex Spiro sending Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg a letter. The letter in question accuses Meta of hiring “dozens” of former Twitter employees who “had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information”, many of whom “improperly retained Twitter documents and electronic devices”. It also says, “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”.
In response, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a Threads post, “No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee – that's just not a thing”. A former senior Twitter employee also told Reuters that they weren’t aware of any former Twitter staff working on Threads or any senior personnel moving to Meta at all after Twitter’s mass layoffs. Nonetheless, Musk has tweeted “Competition is fine, cheating is not” in response to a tweet talking about the news. It’s clear he’s currently committed to the position that Threads is a direct Twitter rip-off, which isn’t that much of a stretch – the user interface is pretty similar to Twitter’s. However, that’s not enough of a basis for a trade secret theft claim. Even if they had hired Twitter employees, which Twitter itself laid off en masse, that wouldn’t necessarily be damning.
If Meta is telling the truth about not having hired any former Twitter employees, that punches a gigantic hole in Twitter’s potential lawsuit. Unfortunately, I do have to agree with some of Musk’s stances on Threads, because even broken clocks are right twice a day. He’s said that “Any social media monopoly is despair”, which is also a concern I have about Threads – consolidating Instagram, Facebook and a Twitter-like platform under a single company is extremely worrying, especially when that company unashamedly collects data from its users. He’s also criticised the algorithm-only system of Threads, which makes it unbearable to use, but is fairly hypocritical considering the completely intolerable Twitter algorithm that lately has been putting increased amounts of transphobia on my timeline and regularly boosts Musk’s own tweets.
However, this deeply annoying man is also mixing in random insults with his valid criticisms of the new platform, agreeing with tweets saying the logo “looks like a tapeworm” and laughing along with Twitter founder Jack Dorsey about how Twitter is being replaced with Twitter clones. Although he has raised some good points, the whole thing amounts to a tantrum about how the platform he destroyed with ego-centric, narcissistic decisions is now carrion food, prime for replacement by companies well-placed to swoop in to supplant his shitposting empire. Funny how a guy who seems to love capitalism so much suddenly isn’t happy anymore when other people are the ones profiting off his failure.