Hours after the launch of Threads, Meta’s app to rival Twitter, dubious information already made its way to thousands of users’ feeds. A claim that Twitter owner Elon Musk tweeted that he downloaded Threads gained 13,000 likes and over 1,500 replies.
The Threads post with this claim read, “I don’t think Elon is happy about this.” It showed a supposed screenshot of Musk’s Twitter profile with a tweet that said, “just downloaded Threads it absolutely f—ing sucks.”
The replies suggested Threads users believed this tweet was real. But it’s not. This image appears to be fabricated.
Musk did tweet about Meta on the day of Threads’ launch, but he did not use that language. In a reply to a July 5 tweet by Internal Tech Emails, Musk said, “It is infinitely preferable to be attacked by strangers on Twitter, than indulge in the false happiness of hide-the-pain Instagram.”
Musk also replied to a tweet that said, “Meta’s new app was built entirely using this keyboard,” showing a photo of the keys Ctrl, C and V, which are used for copying and pasting commands. Musk replied with a laughing emoji.
In another reply, Musk tweeted a crying-with-laughter emoji and a “100” emoji to a tweet that said, “My Facebook/Instagram social graph is basically all the people I knew in High School. ‘A place where you can read all the Twitter-like thoughts of the people you follow on Instagram’ sounds like a special hell.”
The day after Threads’ launch, Twitter threatened legal action against Meta. Musk replied to more tweets about Threads, including one about what Twitter’s legal team called the “systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property.” Musk wrote, “Competition is fine, cheating is not.”
Although some reported on Musk’s response to Threads, no one cited as legitimate the exchange mentioned in this altered image. PolitiFact reached out to the Threads user who posted the photo, but did not hear back.
We rate the claim that Musk tweeted that he downloaded Threads and said it “sucks” False.
This fact check was originally published by PolitiFact, which is part of the Poynter Institute. See the sources for this fact check here.
