Picture for illustrative purposes only. SUPPLIED

Elon Musk’s Twitter has reportedly threatened to sue Meta Platforms over its new Threads app, dubbed by early users as a potential "Twitter killer". News website Semafor, in a report, cited a letter sent by Twitter’s lawyer Alex Spiro to Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook. Meta, which launched Threads on Wednesday (July 5) reportedly logged more than 30 million sign-ups on Threads. As of July, Twitter has reported over 450 million active users. In Spiro’s letter, Twitter expressed concerns that Meta has engaged in “systematic, willful and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property.” “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,” Spiro wrote. Twitter also accused Meta of hiring former Twitter employees who “had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information”. Threads’ user interface has a striking resemblance to the microblogging platform, however, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone denied in a Threads post that former Twitter employees have been hired in their engineering team. Meanwhile, Twitter owner Musk said, “Competition is fine, cheating is not,” in response to a tweet citing the news.

What is Threads?

Threads is a new app from Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. The platform looks similar to Twitter with a largely text-based posts on its feed. Users can also post photos and videos, as well as comment, reply to, repost and quote other users' Threads post. Users can share their post directly to Instagram Stories. Threads is available in 100 countries for iOS and Android users. It comes in more than 30 languages. Users can sign up through their Instagram accounts and keep the same username, account name and password. Thread accounts can be listed as public or private. Users whose Instagram accounts are verified will be automatically verified on Threads. To deactivate your Threads account, you need to delete your Instagram account. In terms of privacy, Threads collects data from the user, including location, contacts, search history, browsing history, contact info and more. ICA/Expat Media
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