Litigation over threads? Twitter threatens Meta with lawsuit

Twitter threatens to sue Threads developer Meta Among other things, the company hired former Twitter employees to imitate the app. The backgrounds.

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 recently unveiled the new platform — a text-based addition to Instagram that’s very similar to Twitter.

Because of threads: Twitter threatens Meta with lawsuit

Like the online magazine semaphore reported, Twitter attorney Alex Spiro sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg just hours after Threads was published. There he accuses the company of systematically, intentionally and unlawfully embezzling trade secrets and other intellectual property from Twitter.

Twitter intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights and urges Meta to take immediate steps to stop Twitter’s use of trade secrets or other highly confidential information, the letter said.

Meta is said to have commissioned former Twitter employees to develop threads

Spiro also wrote that Twitter reserves all rights, including but not limited to the right to seek civil remedies and injunctive relief, without further notice, to prevent any further storage, disclosure or use of its intellectual property by Meta.

In addition, Twitter attorney Meta accused it of hiring dozens of former Twitter employees. They would have access to said trade secrets and other highly confidential information from Twitter.

He also claimed that Meta was hiring these former employees to develop Threads — which he believes is a rip-off from Twitter. They should expressly use the knowledge from their time at the social media company for development and process acceleration. This would violate state and federal law as well as the ongoing obligations of said employees to Twitter.

Meta denies allegations

Since taking over Twitter in October 2022, Elon Musk has laid off thousands of employees. Many of them looked for new jobs in other tech companies. As opposed to Andy Stone, Meta’s Director of Communications semaphore however, said Twitter’s allegations were unfounded. No one from the threads engineering team is a former employee of the microblogging platform. There simply wasn’t such a thing, Stone said.

Lawsuit against threads unlikely

As, among others, Stanford law professor Mark Lemley told the news agency Reuters stated that Twitter would need much more detail than what is in the letter in order to file a trade secret theft lawsuit against Meta.

Just a few minutes after the app was published, Threads already reported ten million users. In the meantime, there are said to be more than 30 million registrations. It is currently considered the strongest competitor for Twitter because it can draw on a database of more than a billion Instagram user accounts.

Musk responded to the publication of what happened semifor on Twitter with the words: “Competition is okay, cheating is not.”

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