The similarities between Threads, Meta’s new app, and Twitter are starting to cause problems for Mark Zuckerberg’s company.
Comparisons between the new social network and Twitter were not long in coming after the launch, and now, Elon Musk’s company’s legal team is threatening to sue Meta over intellectual property rights.
Twitter’s attorney, Alex Spiro, sent a letter to Meta explaining that the company he works for could seek both civil and injunctive relief to prevent “using any Twitter trade secrets or other highly confidential information.” This is because of “serious concerns” that Meta has engaged in “systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property.”
In the letter, the lawyer suggests that Meta hired former Twitter employees and charged them with creating Threads.
The below is a leak of the letter sent by Spiro to Meta, as reported by @semafor.
The allegations centre on trade secrets shared by ex-Twitter employees hired by Meta, but also hints that Meta may have been scraping Twitter's data in violation of the terms of service. pic.twitter.com/Lo6usdsM7Q
— T(w)itter Daily News (@TitterDaily) July 6, 2023
Elon Musk reacts
After news of the Twitter threat surfaced, Elon Musk reacted by stating that while he has no problem with having competition, what he disagrees with is cheating.
“Competition is fine, cheating is not,” he said.
Competition is fine, cheating is not
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 6, 2023
Meta denies accusations
Meta’s director of communications, Andy Stone, wanted to put the rumors to rest, clarifying that it is not true that there were former Twitter employees as part of the Threads engineering team.
“That’s just not a thing,” he assured.
Zuckerberg made his first tweet in more than a decade
On the same day that Meta launched its new application, Mark Zuckerberg wrote a post on Twitter after 11 years of silence.
The publication was a popular meme in which the famous Spiderman character points to another Spiderman, in an apparent reference to the similarities between Threads and Twitter.
— Mark Zuckerberg (@finkd) July 6, 2023
