Twitter threatens to sue Meta over its new Threads app

Alarmed at Instagram Threads’ steep rise, Elon Musk-run Twitter has threatened to sue Meta for allegedly using its trade secrets and poaching its former employees to build the new “copycat” platform that saw over 30 million users in just 24 hours.

Twitter lawyer 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”, reports Semafor. “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.

“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,” the Twitter lawyer added.

Spiro also 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.” In the letter, the lawyer claimed that Meta took advantage of the access former Twitter employees had and asked them to create a “copycat” app, which is “in violation of both state and federal law.”

Andy Stone, Meta’s communications director, 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,” he was quoted as saying. While there has not been any further clarification from Meta, it does not seem all too concerned about the threat. Twitter previously accused Microsoft of misusing the company’s API by integrating them into some of their products. But after that, nothing really concrete happened between the two.

Maybe Meta is thinking the same, and it has all the more reasons. Twitter uses an open source software, built by a team of engineers. That means this software is accessible to anyone to tweak and use for their own product — much like Android’s AOSP.

Musk said in a tweet on Friday: “Competition is fine, cheating is not.” Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino on Thursday appealed to the Twitter community to stay together. She said that on Twitter, everyone’s voice matters.

“Whether you’re here to watch history unfold, discover real-time information all over the world, share your opinions, or learn about others — on Twitter you can be real,” Yaccarino posted. “You built the Twitter community. And that’s irreplaceable. This is your public square,” she added. Yaccarino said that “we are often imitated but the Twitter community can never be duplicated”.

— Written with inputs from IANS

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