Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over concerns about its new Threads app, according to a letter obtained by Semafor. In the letter, which is addressed to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter lawyer Alex Spiro argues that Meta used Twitterâs trade secrets and intellectual property to build Threads.
Spiro, who is also Elon Muskâs personal lawyer and a partner at the Quinn Emanuel law firm, claims that Meta hired âdozensâ of ex-Twitter employees to develop Threads, which wouldnât be all that surprising given just how many people were fired following Muskâs takeover.
But according to Twitter, many of these former workers still have access to Twitterâs trade secrets and other confidential information. Twitter alleges that Meta took advantage of this and tasked these employees with developing a âcopycatâ app âin violation of both state and federal law.â
As a result, Twitter is threatening legal action in the form of âboth civil remedies and injunctive relief.â It also âdemands that Meta take immediate steps to stop using any Twitter trade secrets or other highly confidential informationâ and says Meta isnât allowed to crawl or scrape Twitterâs data, either.
Meta responded to Twitterâs letter in a post on Threads, with communications director Andy Stone stating, âNo one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee â thatâs just not a thing.â Meta doesnât seem all too concerned about this, and that may be because Twitter isnât all that shy about threatening legal action. In May, Twitter accused Microsoft of abusing the companyâs API through integrations with some of its products.
Meta launched Threads on Wednesday night, with celebrities and brands the first to get on board. Less than 24 hours since the appâs launch, Threads has garnered over 30 million registered users, while internal data obtained by The Vergeâs Alex Heath indicates that users have already made over 95 million threads.
âCompetition is fine, cheating is not,â Musk said in a reply to a post about the letter on Twitter.
If former employees still have access to trade secrets, isnât that Twitters fault for not thoroughly revoking access for its former employees? Thatâs one of the first things you should do when someone leaves your company.
He literally fired the team in charge of that đ
I even love saying the word âteamâ.