Elon Musk’s Twitter Threatens to Sue Zuckerberg’s Meta over New Threads App
Emmanuel Addeh in Abuja
Twitter has expressed reservation over Meta’s Threads app, a new text-based Instagram sibling and has therefore threatened legal action against the company, accusing it of poaching former employees and unlawfully misappropriating trade secrets and 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,” Alex Spiro, Elon Musk’s personal lawyer, wrote in a letter to Meta.
“Twitter reserves all rights, including, but not limited to, the right to seek both civil remedies and injunctive relief without further notice to prevent any further retention, disclosure, or use of its intellectual property by Meta,” Musk added.
Spiro, who is acting on behalf of Twitter parent X Corp, claimed that Meta has hired dozens of ex-Twitter employees over the last year.
He claimed the company “deliberately assigned” them to work on Threads “with the specific intent that they use Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property in order to accelerate development of Meta’s competing app.”
According to Twitter , this violates state and federal laws as well as those employees’ obligations to their former employer. In addition, Spiro said Meta is prohibited from scraping Twitter data relating to who people follow.
Meta has refuted Spiro’s claims. “No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing,” Meta communications director Andy Stone wrote on Threads.
For the time being, Threads users need to sign up for the app with their Instagram profile. It’s an easy process that helped Meta quickly sign up tens of millions of users.
Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg said that 30 million people had joined Threads by Thursday morning, just over 12 hours after the app went live, Associated Press reported.
“I write on behalf of X Corp., as successor in interest to Twitter, Inc. Based on recent reports regarding your recently launched ‘Thread’ app. Twitter has serious concerns that Meta Platforms has engaged in systematic, willful a d systematic misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property.
“Over the past year, Meta has hired dozens of former Twitter employees. Twitter knows that these employees previously worked at Twitter; that these employees had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information; that these employees owe ongoing obligations to Twitter; and that many of these employees have improperly retained Twitter documents and electronic devices.
“With that knowledge, Meta deliberately assigned these employees to develop, in a matter of months, Meta’s copycat ‘Threads’ app with the specific intent that they use Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property in order to accelerate the development of Meta’s competing app, in violation of both state and federal law as well as those employees’ ongoing obligations to Twitter.
“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.
“ Twitter reserves all rights, including, but not limited to, the right to seek both civil remedies and injunctive relief without further notice to prevent any further retention, disclosure, or use of its intellectual property by Meta,” part of the letter read.
Further, Twitter said that Meta is expressly prohibited from engaging in any crawling or scraping of its followers or following data.
As set forth in Twitter’s Terms of Service, it said that crawling any Twitter services — including, but not limited to, any Twitter websites, SMS, APIs, email notifications, applications, buttons, widgets, ads, and commerce services — is permissible only “if done in accordance with the provisions of the robots.txt file”
“Please consider this letter a formal notice that Meta must preserve any documents that could be relevant to a dispute between Twitter, Meta, and/or former Twitter employees who now work for Meta.
“That includes, but is not limited to, all documents related to the recruitment, hiring, and onboarding of these former Twitter employees, the development of Meta’s competing Threads app, and any communications between these former Twitter employees and any agent, representative, or employee or Meta,” Musk stated.
