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07th Jul 2023

MrBeast becomes first person to hit 1 million followers on ‘Twitter killer’ app Threads

Jack Peat

He’s calling himself the future Threads CEO

Mark Zuckerberg’s new ‘Twitter killer’ app is barely two days old – but it already has it’s first one million follower account in the shape of social media influencer, MrBeast.

New figures show thirty million people have signed up to the new Meta app since it was launched on Thursday, wooed by its sleek functionality and dismayed by many traditional Twitter features being put behind a ‘blue tick’ paywall.

And a remarkable one in 30 of them are following the same one account after influencer MrBeast joined the platform.

The popular YouTuber – real name Jimmy Donaldson – has gained a massive following online thanks to his videos which pull major stunts and feature big prize giveaways for participants.

His online presence is worth so much that someone once tried to pay him a billion dollars to obtain his YouTube channel.

At one point, it was thought that a tenth of the world had watched one of his videos like the one below, which has a remarkable 149 million views.

Threads has taken off since its launch on Thursday, and it has clearly ruffled the feathers of a certain Elon Musk, who has threatened legal action over the ‘copycat’ platform.

A lawyer representing the company released a letter on Thursday that read: “Twitter has serious concerns that Meta Platforms (Meta’) has engaged in systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property.

“Twitter intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights, and demands that Meta take immediate steps to stop using any Twitter trade secrets or other highly confidential information.”

Spiro accused Meta of hiring dozens of former Twitter employees who ‘had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information.

He also claimed Meta assigned those staffers to create ‘copycat ‘Threads’ with the intent to use Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property in order to further the development of Twitter’s competitor.

“Meta is expressly prohibited from engaging in any crawling or scraping of Twitter’s followers or following data. As set forth in Twitter’s Terms of Service, crawling any Twitter services,” the letter stated.

The letter alleged the app is in violation of both state and federal law as well as those employees “ongoing obligations to Twitter.”

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