https://www.semafor.com/article/07/06/2023/twitter-is-threatening-to-sue-meta-over-threads Twitter is threatening legal action against Meta over its new text-based “Twitter killer” platform, accusing the social media giant of poaching former employees to create a “copycat” application. On Wednesday, Instagram parent company Meta introduced Threads, a text-based companion to Instagram that resembles Twitter and other text-based social platforms. Just hours later, a lawyer for Twitter, Alex Spiro, sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg accusing the company of engaging in “systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other 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,” Spiro wrote in a letter obtained exclusively by Semafor. “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.” Spiro accused Meta of hiring dozens of former Twitter employees who “had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information.” He also alleged that Meta assigned those employees to develop “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.” A Meta source told Semafor that Twitter’s accusations are baseless. “No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing,” the source said. Twitter’s letter is an early sign that Threads is the most serious rival yet to Musk’s chaotic, but still-central, platform. Since Musk bought Twitter last year, a chorus of dissatisfied voices have complained about the tech billionaire’s rightward political tilt and the site’s degraded user experience. But despite criticism from both opponents of Musk’s politics and users upset with the new owner’s aggressive attempts to charge for Twitter, alternatives that have emerged such as Post.News, Mastodon, and Bluesky have failed to gain mainstream traction and large user bases. Threads may be the most serious threat yet to take users (and ad dollars) away from Twitter. Meta has the resources to commit serious time and money to competing with Twitter. And it has a built-in network of billions of Instagram users to build on: Threads lets users immediately find and port over their Instagram followers instead of rebuilding their network from scratch. Meta also has long experience hobbling rivals with successful copycats. Instagram Stories stopped Snapchat’s growth, while Reels is muscling through as a TikTok rival. On Thursday, Zuckerberg announced that Threads had already signed up 30 million users in its first day, vastly dwarfing competitors. (Bluesky last reported that it had 50,000 users.)
Meta has stolen features and products from the entire social media ecosystem. I imagine their lawyers and legal counsel know exactly what they're doing. Their whole business is stealing concepts from competitors. I'm not even sure if Twitter can afford the legal fees to fight this.
Yep if Twitter wants to sue Meta then Snapchat needs to sue the **** out of them for stealing Stories, and TikTok for stealing IG reels. Since neither company has successfully sued Meta, then Twitter sure as hell won't be able to.
Also one other thing. Didn't Musk want to make the whole thing open source? He had already started to open up components of twitter with plans to open up the whole thing. How can you make a claim around trade secrets if your plan was to make everything open source? Also he fired all of his engineers so how can he claim that Threads poached them?
I'm sure there were. https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-relea...ployers-and-workers-noncompete-agreements-are
None of which are enforceable in California and New York (Twitter's primary offices). Zero chance of winning an NDA claim in California.
Seems like a desperate attempt by Musk, after correctly realizing that Thread will be a huge headache for Musk's Twitter.
Musk has two companies chalked full of some of the best attorneys on this planet. I don't think legal fees will be an issue.
Twitter can't even pay its own rent. It doesn't pay janitors. It's being sued by just about everyone for failing to pay its bills. And Musk's best-attorneys-on-the-planet repeatedly have lost massive legal cases and even been openly laughed at by the Delaware courts for their ridiculousness in the Twitter purchase lawsuit. And Musk threatens lawsuits all the time and then doesn't follow up. This is going nowhere.
yeah, I dont know anything about the law suits. All I stated was that he could allocate a few resources from his other companies if he really needed to.
I doubt elons lawyers are better than Metas. Meta gets sued by governments around the world lmao. They have the best lawyers
Zuck leaning hard into censorship/user manipulation/data collection. He wants total control. Dude is utterly soulless. It will be a failure, just like his bitcoin competitor.
You don’t have to use any social media service. The only service you have to use is Apple vs Google. Or Apple vs Microsoft.
The letter was more of a preemptive accusation, just in case Meta was using trade secrets from Twitter. Like most good conspiracy thinkers, Musk probably assumed that some of his former Twitter employees would "spill the beans" and help Meta, and that Meta has been scraping Twitter data to build their new Twitter clone. It would be somewhat funny if Meta actually scraped Twitter data so massively that it led Twitter to rate limit, which led to Meta's opportunistic release, and in turn, caused Musk to scramble and sue....
