Twitter is threatening to sue Threads developer Meta. Among other things, the company had hired former Twitter employees to imitate the app. The background.
Elon Musk is apparently not particularly amused by Mark Zuckerberg’s microblogging alternative Threads: A letter reveals that Twitter is threatening to sue Meta. Instagram’s parent company only recently introduced the new platform – a text-based supplement to Instagram that is very similar to Twitter.
Over Threads: Twitter threatens Meta with lawsuit
As the online magazine Semafor reports, Twitter lawyer Alex Spiro sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg just a few hours after Threads was published. There, he accuses the company of systematically intentionally and unlawfully misappropriating Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property.
Twitter intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights and is asking Meta to take immediate steps to stop the use of Twitter’s trade secrets or other highly confidential information, the letter continues.
Meta allegedly hired former Twitter employees to develop Threads
Spiro also wrote that Twitter reserved all rights, including but not limited to the right to seek both civil remedies and injunctive relief without further notice, to prevent any further storage, disclosure or use of its intellectual property by Meta.
In addition, the Twitter lawyer accused Meta of hiring dozens of former Twitter employees. They would have access to said trade secrets and other highly confidential information of Twitter.
He also alleged that Meta hired these former employees to develop Threads – in his view, a copycat of Twitter. The knowledge from their time at the social media company should be used explicitly for development and process acceleration. This would constitute a breach of both state and federal laws, as well as the said employees’ ongoing obligations to Twitter.
Meta denies allegations
Since taking over Twitter in October 2022, Elon Musk has laid off thousands of employees. Many of them sought new jobs at other tech companies. However, Andy Stone, Meta’s director of communications told Semafor that Twitter’s allegations are unfounded. No one on the Threads engineering team is a former employee of the microblogging platform. There is simply no such thing, Stone said.
Lawsuit against Threads unlikely
As Stanford law professor Mark Lemley, among others, told Reuters news agency, Twitter would need much more detail than what is in the letter to bring a trade secret theft lawsuit against Meta.
Just a few minutes after the app’s release, Threads reported ten million users. In the meantime, there are said to be more than 30 million registrations. It is currently considered Twitter’s strongest competitor because it can draw on a database of more than one billion user accounts from Instagram.
Musk reacted to the publication of the events by Semifor on Twitter with the words: “Competition is okay, cheating is not.
