13:45pm, Friday, 07/07/23, Johannesburg

Two of the wealthiest men on the planet Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are on a potential legal battle collision course over their respective social media platforms.

On Wednesday, Zuckerberg launched his 'Threads' social media platform which parent company META has said has garnered over 30-million users in less that 78-hours.

Threads is a similar social media app to Twitter and this has gotten Musk very very tight as millennials would say.

Musk is considering legal action against Meta, contending that "competition is fine, cheating is not".

Threads is uncannily similar to Twitter but where do you draw the line of how social media apps can do and must look like?

According to an America Securities Exchange Commission  filing from 2013, Twitter four years to build the same number of users that Threads app gained in a single day day (30 million users).

Threads defended the advantage saying that it was able to tap into the pre-existing two billion monthly users parent company Meta says Instagram has.

Elon Musk will face an uphill battle in court as US copyright law does not protect ideas, meaning that for Twitter to be successful in an intellectual property violation against Threads in court it would have to prove that its own intellectual property, such as programming code, was copied.

Furthermore, META currently holds a patent for "communicating a newsfeed" which is the system that displays all the latest posts when you use Facebook, where META contends that it uses it's own technology to run Threads.

Uploaded videos on Threads can be 5-minutes long, well over the 2-minutes provisioned for standard Twitter users.

You can't use hashtags on Threads but you can on Twitter.


There are no 'trending stories' on Threads but there are on Twitter.

These are some of the differences between the two social media companies owned by two of some of the richest men in the world.

Written by Thabo Makaota, senior writer @TheLegalSA