Twitter has threatened Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg with legal action over its recently released Threads app. Meta had, as expected, launched its Twitter rival Threads on Thursday, and very quickly it surpassed 30 million sign-ups, amid warnings from analysts that it could pose a true threat to Elon Musk’s Twitter.
Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk initially responded to the launch by joking about Threads' data collection code of practice. And even current Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino did not seem concerned after tweeting that Twitter was “often imitated but never duplicated."
Given the scale of the Threads signups from users unhappy with the current state of Twitter under Elon Musk's controversial ownership, the tone soon changed. “Meta’s release of Threads came at the appropriate time to give it a fighting chance to unseat Twitter,” Niklas Myhr, professor of marketing at Chapman University, was quoted by Reuters. This was in reference to Twitter's turmoil afterlimitingtweets.
“Threads will be off to a running start as it is built upon the Instagram platform with its massive user base. If users adopt Threads, advertisers will follow closely behind,” Myhr added.
Threads is automatically linked to a user’s Instagram account, a move that provides access to more than 2 billion monthly active Instagram users.
Meta is pitching Threads as Instagram’s friendly and open text-based conversation app, and to tempt Twitter users, its interface is similar to the microblogging platform. And now X Corp’s (owner of Twitter) lawyer, Alex Spiro, has threatened to sue Meta in a letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, accusing Meta of "wilful" misappropriation of trade secrets. In the letter, Spiro alleged that Meta’s Threads was built by former Twitter employees “deliberately assigned” to develop a “copycat” app.
In the letter, Spiro offered no concrete examples of Twitter employees using trade secrets to build the app. But many believe the letter is a sign of Musk's concern, given Meta’s user base and technical expertise.
“Based on recent reports regarding your recently launched ‘Threads’ app, Twitter has serious concerns that Meta Platforms has engaged in systematic, wilful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property,” wrote Spiro. Spiro said that over the past year, Meta has hired dozens of former Twitter employees. These employees allegedly had access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information.
Spiro alleged Meta used these former Twitter staff to accelerate Meta's competing app development. But it should be noted that Meta has been developing a Twitter rival for a few years now. In August 2019, reports emerged that Facebook was developing an upcoming app called Threads, built on Instagram.
Spiro said Twitter intends to “strictly enforce its intellectual property rights” and demanded that Meta stop using undisclosed Twitter trade secrets. Spiro also wrote that Meta is “expressly prohibited from engaging in any crawling or scraping of Twitter’s followers or following data.” “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,” Spiro concluded.
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