Europe 1 with AFP / Photo credit: LORENZO DI COLA / NURPHOTO / AFP 12:15 pm, July 10, 2023

Five days after its launch, the Threads application, created by Meta, crossed the 100 million user mark in the United States. An application to compete with Twitter, the social network bought by Elon Musk. The latter has also decided to counterattack, especially because of the similarities between the two applications.

The Threads application, created by Meta to compete with Twitter, crossed the 100 million user mark on Monday, less than a week after its launch, according to the Quiver Quantitative website. Meta, parent company of Facebook and Instagram, inaugurated last Wednesday this application of "microblogging", the first major threat to the Twitter platform weakened since its acquisition last year by billionaire Elon Musk.

Not yet available in Europe

Earlier this year, the artificial intelligence application ChatGPT, created by OpenAI, took two months to reach this threshold of active users. The number of users of Threads is still far from that of Twitter, which has more than 350 million users. But Meta's app can count on synergies with the hugely popular image-sharing app Instagram, which has some 2 billion active users.

>> READ ALSO - Loss of value, advertisers disappeared, users dissatisfied... Twitter in turmoil

Threads allows Instagram users to be authenticated with their existing credentials to post content on the new platform. It is not yet launched in the European Union, where this practice seems prohibited by the Digital Markets Regulation (DMA), a new legislation that will apply to digital giants from March 2024, according to experts.

Elon Musk strikes back

Elon Musk also decided to fight back, sending through the lawyer of Twitter's parent company, X Corp, a letter accusing Meta of infringing trade secrets and violating intellectual property rights. The parent company of Facebook is accused of having recruited "dozens" of former employees of Twitter, according to the document published by the news site Semafor.

>> READ ALSO - Social networks: mandatory parental consent before the age of 15 adopted by Parliament

Putting Meta on notice to cease its actions, X Corp said it was ready to take legal action if not. "Competition is not a problem. Cheating is one of them," Musk said on Twitter.