How similar is Instagram’s new social media app Threads from Twitter? Twitter threatened Instagram parent firm Meta with legal action earlier last week in a cease-and-desist letter over the new text-based app Threads, which it branded a “copycat.” Threads, the latest competitor to Elon Musk’s social media site, has attracted tens of millions of members since its introduction.
Threads developers reacted angrily to the charges, and legal experts point out that much remains uncertain. For the time being, “it’s sort of a big question mark,” said Jacob Noti-Victor, an associate professor at Yeshiva University’s Cardozo Law School who specializes in intellectual property. People who are just starting to explore Threads, on the other hand, are already making their observations. “People are calling it a Twitter clone but I think there are some key product differences,” said Alexandra Popken, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety operations.
One difference, she thinks, will likely be the people who use it. At Threads, “you’re essentially taking your audience from Instagram and putting this into a new text-based app, whereas Twitter is a kind of a niche audience for politicians, celebrities, and news junkies,” she said. Even though the Threads creators have stated that they are not interested in making it a political platform, it is likely to draw journalists and politicians looking for a Twitter alternative.
Meta accused of copying Twitter, denies employing former Twitter employees
Threads, according to Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri, is not intended to replace Twitter. “The goal is to create a public square for communities on Instagram that never really embraced Twitter and for communities on Twitter (and other platforms) that are interested in a less angry place for conversations, but not all of Twitter,” he said.
Politics and hard news will undoubtedly appear on Threads, he admitted, “but we’re not going to do anything to encourage those verticals.” In a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday, Alex Spiro, an attorney for Twitter, accused Meta of violating Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property by recruiting former Twitter employees to create a “copycat” software.
Musk commented in response to a tweet concerning the possibility of legal action against Meta, “Competition is fine, cheating is not.” In a Threads article on Thursday, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone stated that “no one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee.” Noti-Victor said it’s difficult to tell what the trade secrets referred to in Spiro’s letter, which was received first by news source Semafor on Thursday.
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Ex-Twitter employees “improperly retained” business documents and electronic equipment, according to Spiro, citing ongoing confidentiality obligations. However, there was no explicit reference in the letter to a breach of any contractual agreement, and most noncompete agreements, for example, are illegal in California. In addition, despite Threads’ similarities to Twitter, “just the idea of creating a social media platform involving text (is) certainly not something that would be a trade secret,” Noti-Victor added.
For similar reasons, he is dubious of intellectual property abuses, saying that firms “can’t patent something that’s obvious” or copyright a general idea for a social networking site. Copyright can protect source code and the text of a website, but Noti-Victor said he doesn’t see that reproduced in Threads. Experts note that corporations in Silicon Valley are continually developing items or services based on the versions of competitors.“The industry has a storied past of borrowing ideas from each other,” said Popken, adding that Threads and other platforms such as Mastodon and Bluesky are “trying to capitalize on what is demand for a suitable, safer alternative to Twitter.”
Meta receives formal notice from Twitter over data scraping allegations
Meta has a history of launching independent apps that mimic competitors, several of which were eventually shut down. Aside from the charges of trade secrets and intellectual property infringement, Spiro also stated that Meta is barred from “engaging in any crawling or scraping of Twitter’s followers or following data.” He described the letter as a “formal notice” to Meta to keep records pertaining to a possible dispute between the firms.
Carl Tobias, a legal professor at the University of Richmond’s School of Legal, said that any letter of this nature should be taken seriously — but he, too, emphasized that much remains unclear. If litigation is pursued, more specific allegations and documents may emerge. Tobias noted that Twitter’s decision could be motivated by publicity as much as a legal and business strategy. Musk’s legal team has made similar steps in the past, including a letter to Microsoft in May protesting the misuse of Twitter data to train artificial intelligence systems. This week, Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey, who has championed Bluesky, joked in a tweet: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 7 Twitter clones.”
Popken, who now works at the content moderation startup WebPurify, says the best thing about Threads so far is how much fun she’s having with it. “I see brands like Slim Jim trying to be funny. I see influencers who I follow on Instagram and people who I care about in my life,” she said. “There’s like this period of time where the bad actors haven’t found it yet. It’s like this non-toxic, happy corner of the internet. ”But “make no mistake,” she added, those content moderation problems that have plagued other platforms “will certainly strike Threads over time.”