Is Mark Zuckerberg a copycat? When Meta CEO found ‘inspiration’ from rivals

Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday (6 July) intensified his rivalry with Elon Musk by launching Threads, what many has described as a Twitter-killer. Since launching, the new app has garnered record-breaking numbers; internal data reveals that within the first 24 hours, Threads, has seen over 30 million sign-ups and 95 million posts, angering Twitter owner Elon Musk.

Such has been the response that reports have emerged that Twitter is threatening legal action against Meta, the parent company of Instagram, over its new text-based platform called Threads. Alex Spiro, Twitter owner Elon Musk’s personal lawyer, has sent a letter to Zuckerberg, according to a Fortune report, accusing the company of poaching dozens of former employees and using Twitter’s trade secrets and intellectual property to create a “copycat” application.

And it’s not just Musk who has accused Zuckerberg of being a copycat. Netizens noted that Threads, the new app launched by Meta shared too many similarities with Twitter, with one user even writing, “Meta’s new app was built entirely using this keyboard: Ctrl+C+V (that’s copy paste, in computer lingo).”

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In fact, there have been several times that Zuckerberg has been found to have copied ideas from another app. Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives even told CNBC, “They’re not building anything with this platform. It’s just a platform that’s looking to tap into a massive Instagram install base and take the frustration and hate toward Musk and Twitter, bottle it and look to gain market share.”

He further added, “That’s really been the DNA of Zuckerberg and Facebook. Ultimately, it’s just Zuckerberg trying to further monetise the install base off of other ideas that have worked within social media.”

As Threads gains momentum, here are other examples of copycat apps and features that Zuckerberg has tried to incorporate into at least one of Meta’s apps.

‘Meta Verified’

Before Threads came along, Zuckerberg in March announced ‘Meta Verified’ for Facebook and Instagram users in the US. The feature promised to give a person benefits like a blue verification badge, proactive impersonation protections, and direct access to customer support. The subscription costs $11.99 (Rs 991) per month on the web and $14.99 (Rs 1,240) per month on mobile devices.

Doesn’t this sound similar? It is after all, Zuckerberg borrowing from Elon Musk’s Blue subscription service for Twitter with an $8 (Rs 661) price tag that enables users to post longer tweets, see fewer advertisements and post videos up to 60 minutes long.

Meta’s Lasso

Seeing TikTok’s popularity growing unabated, Zuckerberg in 2018 launched Lasso, allowing users to shoot up to 15-second long videos and overlay popular songs. The app centred on an algorithmic feed of recommended videos, but also allowed users to tap through hashtags or a Browse page of themed collections.

Lasso was available in Colombia, Mexico, the United States, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Panama, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Ecuador and Uruguay, research firm Sensor Tower told TechCrunch. In early 2020, it also added support for Hindi, prompting speculation that Facebook may eventually bring the new app to India.

However, it seems that Lasso couldn’t rope in enough fans and Zuckerberg announced the closure of the app on 10 July 2020.

Instagram comes up with Reels

After Lasso couldn’t take on ByteDance’s Tiktok, Instagram – which is also owned by Meta – launched Reels in 2020. It is a short-form video product that looks a lot like TikTok and since then has grabbed Facebook users’ attention.

In 2023, data has shown that Instagram Reels has an average watch rate of 13.08 per cent which is significantly higher than TikTok – having a watch rate of 9.06 per cent.

Instagram Stories

Another example of Zuckerberg copying from others would be Instagram Stories, introduced in 2016 as a direct challenge to Snapchat, along with the fun face filters. The move came after Snapchat rejected Meta’s offer to be bought over.

When launched, Stories took the real momentum away from Snapchat and even saw its user growth rate slow down. By mid-2018, Instagram Stories had twice as many daily users as Snapchat.

Whatsapp edit messages

Have you ever sent someone a Whatsapp message and realised there was an error in it and wished to edit it? In May this year, the Meta-owned platform gave its users the ability to edit messages in a 15-minute timeframe after it was sent.

“From correcting a simple misspelling to adding extra context to a message, we’re excited to bring you more control over your chats,” the company had written.

Incidentally, this feature has long existed on other messaging apps, such as Telegram and Signal. Twitter also offers a 30-minute message editing window to the subscribers of its Twitter Blue service.

Hobbi

In 2020, Facebook’s New Product Experimentation team had come out with Hobbi, an app designed to rival Pinterest. Hobbi clearly took cues from Pinterest, but wasn’t able to capture the minds of users.

Few months later, Meta called it a day on Hobbi. The app only gained 7,000 downloads, according to estimates from Sensor Tower. Apptopia also reported the app had under 10,000 downloads

Hashtags on Facebook

When one things of hashtags, they think of Twitter and that’s why Facebook, suffering from hashtag FOMO (fear of missing out), launched hashtags to users’ News Feeds in 2013 as a way to “discover more of the world’s conversations”. These hashtags essentially served the same purpose as did they on Twitter – allowing people to find new topics.

With inputs from agencies