Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over concerns about its new Threads app, according to a letter obtained by Semafor. In the letter, which is addressed to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter lawyer Alex Spiro argues that Meta used Twitter’s trade secrets and intellectual property to build Threads.

Spiro, who is also Elon Musk’s personal lawyer and a partner at the Quinn Emanuel law firm, claims that Meta hired “dozens” of ex-Twitter employees to develop Threads, which wouldn’t be all that surprising given just how many people were fired following Musk’s takeover.

But according to Twitter, many of these former workers still have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other confidential information. Twitter alleges that Meta took advantage of this and tasked these employees with developing a “copycat” app “in violation of both state and federal law.”

As a result, Twitter is threatening legal action in the form of “both civil remedies and injunctive relief.” It also “demands that Meta take immediate steps to stop using any Twitter trade secrets or other highly confidential information” and says Meta isn’t allowed to crawl or scrape Twitter’s data, either.

Meta responded to Twitter’s letter in a post on Threads, with communications director Andy Stone stating, “No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing.” Meta doesn’t seem all too concerned about this, and that may be because Twitter isn’t all that shy about threatening legal action. In May, Twitter accused Microsoft of abusing the company’s API through integrations with some of its products.

Meta launched Threads on Wednesday night, with celebrities and brands the first to get on board. Less than 24 hours since the app’s launch, Threads has garnered over 30 million registered users, while internal data obtained by The Verge’s Alex Heath indicates that users have already made over 95 million threads.

“Competition is fine, cheating is not,” Musk said in a reply to a post about the letter on Twitter.

  • Vangarell@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Where is Elon’s PR department? Man won’t stop tarnishing his own reputation.

    I’m fairly sure it doesn’t take trade secrets to build a Twitter clone.

    • FinalFallacy@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      This guy would be three steps ahead of the PR. Dude publicly mocked a guy in a wheelchair who also happened to have a 100 million dollar clause if he was fired, which he was, publicly, on Twitter while having his HIPAA information released by his CEO because he thought he was malingering.

      What PR firm could get ahead of that ONE day, let alone so many others of that level of holy shit? Not one that wants to stay profitable since he’s supposedly stiffing other companies they do business with.

    • model_tar_gz@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Well Twitter, Spotify, and Netflix are all like standard system design/architecture case studies and interview questions. Pretty sure Twitter has been invented like 300,000 times in various iterations. It’s not exactly like CocaCola’s recipe.

    • Chaotic Entropy@feddit.uk
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      1 year ago

      It has been about a decade since his reputation stopped being “tech visionary who will save the world” and started being “edgy pre-teen with a credit card that has no limit”.

    • InvaderDJ@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I think he literally fired the PR department at Twitter, and all emails from press are auto-replied to with a poop emoji. The man is such an unfunny child.