Twitter seems to be sad with the runaway success of Threads, Meta’s Twitter various that launched final night time. Threads has amassed greater than 30 million customers in beneath 24 hours, making it the most important risk to Twitter to this point.
According to Semafor, Twitter lawyer Alex Spiro yesterday despatched Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg a letter [PDF] accusing Meta of “systemic, willful, and lawful misappropriation of Twitter’s commerce secrets and techniques and different mental property.”
Twitter claims that Meta employed “dozens” of former Twitter staff that “had and proceed to have entry to Twitter’s commerce secrets and techniques and different extremely confidential info.” The corporate additional says that the workers “improperly retained Twitter paperwork and digital gadgets,” and that Meta took benefit of this to have these staff develop the “copycat” Threads app on an accelerated timeline.
When Elon Musk took over as CEO of Twitter, he fired hundreds of staff who then needed to search for work. It’s seemingly that a few of these staff transitioned to Meta, however hiring folks actively searching for a job shouldn’t be sometimes thought-about poaching.
Competitors is ok, dishonest shouldn’t be
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 6, 2023
Twitter’s letter says that it plans to “implement its mental property rights,” with the corporate demanding that Meta “take fast steps to cease utilizing any Twitter commerce secrets and techniques.” Twitter threatens that it reserves the proper to hunt “civil treatments and injunctive aid” to stop Meta from utilizing its mental property.
Together with claims that Meta poached Twitter staff to develop Threads, Twitter says that Meta is “expressly prohibited” from scraping Twitter’s followers or following information. Twitter is asking Meta to “protect any paperwork” that might be related to a future dispute, suggesting that Twitter may be planning to file a lawsuit sooner or later.
Twitter has not gone after different Twitter-like social networks that embrace Bluesky and Mastodon, however Threads is a newly-launched app that’s constructed off of Instagram, giving it a notable consumer base from its debut. Mastodon and Bluesky have far fewer customers. In February, for instance, Mastodon had 1.4 million active users, whereas Bluesky had 50,000 users on the finish of April.
Following Twitter’s accusations, Meta’s communications director Andy Stone mentioned that nobody on the Threads engineering staff is a former Twitter worker. “That is simply not a factor,” he wrote.
