Comparing Twitter and Threads: Users and Lawyers Weigh In

To what extent does Instagram’s new app, Threads, resemble Twitter in terms of its conversational features?

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

Threads has attracted tens of millions of users since it launched as the latest competitor to Elon Musk’s social media platform.

The creators of the chains rejected the allegations, and legal experts point out that much is still unknown. For now, “it’s kind 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.

However, people who start exploring Threads are already making their own observations.

“People call it a Twitter clone, but I think there are some key differences between the products,” said Alexandra Popken, Twitter’s former director of trust and safety operations.

One difference, he says, is likely to be the people who use it. With Threads, “you’re essentially taking your audience from Instagram and putting it into a new text-based app, whereas Twitter is kind of a niche for politicians, celebrities and news junkies,” he said.

Although the creators of Threads have said that they are not particularly interested in making it a political forum, it attracts journalists and politicians, among others, who are looking for a Twitter alternative.

Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri said Threads is not intended to replace Twitter.

“The goal is to create a public square for Instagram communities that never adopted Twitter, and communities on Twitter (and other platforms) that are interested in a less angry place to talk, but not all of Twitter,” he said.

Politics and hard news will inevitably appear on Threads, he admitted, “but we’re not going to do anything to encourage those verticals.”

In a letter Wednesday to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter attorney Alex Spiro accused Meta of misappropriating Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property by hiring former Twitter employees to create a “copycat app.”

In response to a tweet about possible legal action against Meta, Musk wrote: “Competition is fine, cheating is not.”

Meta spokesperson Andy Stone responded in a Threads post on Thursday that “no one on the Threads design team is a former Twitter employee.”

Regarding Spiro’s letter, which was first obtained by the news magazine Semafor on Thursday, Noti-Victor said that it is difficult to say what trade secrets are being referred to.

Spiro says Twitter’s former employees “improperly retained” company documents and electronic equipment, suggesting ongoing confidentiality obligations. However, the letter did not specifically refer to any breach of any binding agreement, and most non-compete clauses, for example, are prohibited in California.

Also, despite Threads’ similarities to Twitter, “just the idea of creating a text-based social media platform (is) not really a trade secret,” Noti-Victor added.

He is skeptical of intellectual property infringement for similar reasons, noting that companies “can’t patent something that’s self-evident” or copyright a general idea on a social media platform. Copyright can protect source code and website text, but Noti-Victor said he doesn’t see that being replicated in Threads.

Experts add that Silicon Valley companies constantly make products or services inspired by competitors’ versions.

“The industry has a storied past of borrowing ideas from each other,” said Popken, adding that Threads and other platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky are “trying to capitalize on the demand for a convenient, safer alternative to Twitter.”

Metalla has a track record of launching standalone apps that mirror competitors, although many were later shut down.

In addition to the trade secret and intellectual property claims, Spiro also wrote that Meta must not “engage in indexing or hijacking Twitter followers or data.” He said the letter was a “formal notice” to Metal to preserve documents relevant to a possible dispute between the companies.

Any letter like this should be taken seriously, said Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond School of Law — but he, too, added that much remains unknown. More detailed accusations and documents can be presented if the trial continues.

Tobias speculated that Twitter’s move could be partly publicity and a strategic response, both legally and business-wise. Musk’s legal team has taken similar actions in the past, including a letter to Microsoft in May objecting to the alleged misuse of Twitter data to train artificial intelligence systems.

Among those raising the clone-or-not question this week was Twitter founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey, who has defended Bluesky, joking in a tweet: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 7 Twitter clones.”

For Popken, who now works at content curation startup WebPurify, the thing that stands out most about Threads so far is how much fun he’s having using it.

“I see brands like Slim Jim trying to be funny. I see influencers in my life that I follow on Instagram and people that I care about,” he said. .”

But “make no mistake,” he added, the content moderation issues that have plagued other platforms “will certainly hit Threads over time.”