Less than 24 hours following the release of Meta’s Threads app, Twitter has, in fact, threatened legal action against the company, according to an initial report by Semafor. Meta is being accused by the Elon Musk-owned company it poached staff from Twitter to develop its new platform.
Elon’s attorney Alex Spiro submitted a cease-and-desist letter to Zuckerberg Thursday citing “systematic, willful and unlawful misappropriation” of Twitter’s trade secrets and IP, as well as scraping of Twitter’s data.
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Trade secret information obtained by Meta from former Twitter workers who were recruited by the company is at the centre of the charges, but there are also suggestions that Meta may have violated Twitter’s Terms of Service by scraping Twitter’s data. Threads, a blogging platform with some similarities to Twitter, launched late yesterday and has already attracted over 70 million users, as revealed by Zuckerberg.
Elon musk’s comment on twitter to a tweet by @TitterDaily confirmed this allegation.
Competition is fine, cheating is not
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 6, 2023
Spiro said in the letter that Semafor made public, “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.”
Recently, Twitter has been faced with competition from other social media platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky. While Threads’ UI is very similar to that of the twitter service, the new Meta launched app does not support direct messaging or keyword searching at this time.