Mark Zuckerberg began his career as a criminal and has become much more adept at it over time.
Due to Instagram’s enormous user base, Meta’s (formerly known as Facebook) new Twitter competitor Threads experienced unprecedented growth in its first full day after launching to the public on Wednesday night.
According to the photographs that some users have provided of their membership information, the text-based social networking platform has more than 50 million registered users. The Verge disclosed on Thursday, based on internal business data, that users had already posted over 95 million messages and received 190 million likes.
The fact that Threads is linked to an extant social network, Instagram by Meta, contributes to the exponential growth. As more people acquire the app, users will be able to sign up with their existing Instagram identities and retain a portion of their followers.
According to Jasmine Enberg, Insider Intelligence’s principal analyst, for Meta to be as popular as Twitter, only one-fourth of Instagram users must regularly utilize Threads. In its final quarterly revenue report as a publicly traded company, Twitter reported approximately 238 million daily active users who could be monetized through advertising.
Zuckerberg announced that the company wanted to “create an open and friendly public space for conversation.”
According to tech-news website Ars-Technica, “Musk’s X Corp., the successor company to Twitter, yesterday threatened to sue Meta over alleged intellectual property violations in Meta’s new Threads social network.”
Musk’s lawyer Alex Spiro wrote a letter on behalf of X Corp. to Meta CEO Zuckerberg. “Based on recent reports regarding your recently launched ‘Threads’ app, Twitter has serious concerns that Meta Platforms has engaged in systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property.”
The letter was revealed today in a Semafor article. “Competition is fine, cheating is not,” Musk tweeted about the letter.
Spiro claims ex-Twitter employees built Threads
Spiro’s letter complains about Meta hiring some of the many workers who were laid off or resigned from Twitter in the eight months since Musk bought the company.
“Over the past year, Meta has hired dozens of former Twitter employees… these employees had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information,” Spiro wrote in the letter to Zuckerberg. The workers, he alleged, “owe ongoing obligations to Twitter,” and many “have improperly retained Twitter documents and electronic devices.”
The former CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, noted that the new Instagram Threads feature was already collecting vast amounts of user data.
All your Threads are belong to us https://t.co/FfrIcUng5O pic.twitter.com/V7xbMOfINt
— jack (@jack) July 4, 2023
The owner of a new AI newsletter website called Big Brain Daily noted Zuckerberg’s controlling nature.
The dangers of a world where Zuck controls ALL social media:
Like many other people, I’ve been having fun playing with the new app.
But it’s important to remember what is at stake here…
Zuck already controls the largest:
-Messaging apps on the planet (WhatsApp, Messenger)
-Photo sharing app on the planet (Instagram)
-Friends/family app on the planet (Facebook)
This is the same guy who has regularly censored people, sold off our data to random 3rd parties (Cambridge Analytica), and copied the hard work of others.
The last thing I want is for him to also have control of the top Microblogging app on the planet.
You don’t have to love
@elonmusk
to recognize his commitment to free speech and his place as one of the few remaining contenders to Zuck’s monopoly.
For that reason, I will remain committed to posting on Twitter and I hope you all do the same.
Say no to the Meta monopoly.
🚨 The dangers of a world where Zuck controls ALL social media:
Like many other people, I've been having fun playing with the new app.
But it's important to remember what is at stake here…
Zuck already controls the largest:
-Messaging apps on the planet (WhatsApp,… pic.twitter.com/Inq2iiugQ8
— Alex Valaitis (@alex_valaitis) July 6, 2023