Mark Zuckerberg launched Meta's answer to Twitter July 6, a text-based social media platform called the Threads app. The launch got off to a strong start, with Zuckerberg clocking more than 30 million sign-ups by late morning on the same day.
And the new app certainly caught the attention of Elon Musk, the Tesla CEO who bought Twitter for $44 billion last year. Twitter sent (META) -) a cease-and-desist letter, threatening legal action against the tech rival for allegedly hiring former Twitter employees in order to create a "copycat" of Twitter, an accusation Meta sources have called baseless.
DON'T MISS: Twitter Employee Explains Why Threads App Poses a Real Threat to Elon Musk
But beyond the legal letter -- which Musk confirmed by tweeting, "Competition is fine, cheating is not" -- Musk fired off some shots at Zuckerberg and his new app.
Musk, in response to a tweet highlighting the alleged media monopoly that Meta controls, said, "any social media monopoly is despair." The original tweet points out that Meta already owns WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook, saying that while Musk is an advocate of free speech, Zuckerberg has "regularly censored people, sold off our data to random third parties (Cambridge Analytica) and copied the hard work of others."
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Musk also criticized the algorithms that run Instagram and Threads.
"A closed source, algorithm-only system means that manipulation of what information people see is essentially undetectable," Musk tweeted. He also commented on a tweet highlighting a brief exchange between a 19-year-old Zuckerberg and a college friend shortly after the initial launch of Facebook, typing "!!"
Mark Zuckerberg talking about Facebook users pic.twitter.com/NhWDh7t50S
— Andrew (@andrewmichaelio) July 6, 2023
Musk also highlighted a tweet that pointed out Threads' privacy policy with a photo explaining that Meta may collect data including health & fitness, financial information, contacts, browsing history, usage data, location, device information and other sensitive data.
Some of this information overlaps with the data that Twitter collects, which includes cookies, location data, device information which includes IP address and browser type and information related to users' identities, according to Twitter's privacy policy.
Zuckerberg, who is hoping that Threads will exceed one billion users, something Twitter has been unable to do, said in a thread July 6 that the launch went as well as he could have hoped.
"I'd say round one is off to a good start!" Zuckerberg said.
Meta's stock opened at $292.18 per share.
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