Clone or competitor? Users and lawyers compare Twitter and Threads

New York: Just how similar is Instagram’s chatty new app, Threads, to Twitter?

In a cease-and-desist letter earlier this week, Twitter threatened legal action against Instagram parent company Meta over the new text-based app Threads, which it called a “copycat.”

Threads has drawn tens of millions of users since launching as the latest rival to Elon Musk’s social media platform.

Threads creators pushed back on the accusations, and legal experts note that much is still unknown. For now, “it’s sort of a big question mark,” Jacob Noti-Victor, an associate professor at Yeshiva University’s Cardozo Law School who specializes in intellectual property, told The Associated Press.

The people starting to explore Threads, however, are already making their own 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.

Yet even though Threads makers have said they aren’t particularly interested in making it a politics forum, it’s likely to attract journalists and politicians, among others, looking for a Twitter alternative. Instagram’s CEO, Adam Mosseri, said Threads isn’t aiming 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 inevitably show up on Threads, he acknowledged, “but we’re not going to do anything to encourage those verticals.” In a Wednesday letter addressed to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Alex Spiro, an attorney representing Twitter, accused Meta of unlawfully using Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property by hiring former Twitter employees to create a “copycat” app.

In a reply to a tweet about the possibility of legal action against Meta, Musk wrote: “Competition is fine, cheating is not.” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone responded in a Threads post Thursday that “no one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee.”

From Spiro’s letter, which was first obtained by news outlet Semafor on Thursday, Noti-Victor said it’s hard to tell what the trade secrets referred to might be. Spiro says ex-Twitter employees “improperly retained” company documents and electronic devices — pointing to ongoing confidentiality obligations.

There was no explicit reference, however, to a breach of any binding agreement in the letter, and most noncompete clauses, for example, are prohibited in California. (AP)