In just a few months, Elon Musk’s management of Twitter almost destroyed the platform. Meta’s Threads might be the final nail in the coffin.
The fight between billionaires Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg could move from the ring to a federal court. Twitter, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk, threatened to sue Meta, the company managed by Mark Zuckerberg, over their newly launched product.
Yesterday, Thursday July 6th, Meta officially launched Threads: the social media platform set to rival Twitter. Though its launch in the European Union has been delayed due to privacy concerns, Threads has already reached 50 million subscribers in one day.
Threads is directly linked to Meta’s most popular platform: Instagram. As Insider Intelligence Principal Analyst Jasmine Enberg put it: "Meta only needs 1 in 4 Instagram users to use Threads monthly for it to be as big as Twitter." Instagram, according to Meta’s data, regularly reaches 2 billion active users monthly.
Threads is a text-based platform with a similar layout to Twitter, however lacking a feature for direct messaging.
Twitter’s lawyer Alex Spiro sent a letter to Meta threatening legal action against the new product. "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," the letter reads.
According to the letter, Meta hired former Twitter employees to share corporate secrets. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone denied these claims.
Reuters interviewed a Stanford law professor who said these allegations were not enough to support a lawsuit. "The fact that Facebook created a somewhat similar site is unlikely to support a trade secrets claim," the professor said.
Digging its own grave
Threads is the most prominent Twitter competitor to emerge in the latest months, but it’s far from the only one. Mastodon and Bluesky are two newly born social media platforms that are increasingly gaining traction.
The "exodus" from Twitter started last October when Tesla CEO Elon Musk personally purchased the platform for $44 billion.
Having laid off thousands of employees, Musk took several measures actively eroding the platform’s consumer experience. Most recently, he announced new measures limiting the number of tweets users could read per day.
Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta seized this opportunity to grow its user base, intercepting fleeing Twitter users. Unlike Mastodon and Bluesky, Meta has the firepower and experience to put the final nail in Twitter’s coffin.
Meta, also owner of Facebook and Whatsapp, has gained 134% in stock price since the beginning of the year. The company’s stock reached an all-time high in September 2021.
After the Threads announcement, Meta’s stock rallied 2.34% this week. The success of the new platform might give Meta new life.
