Following the launch of Threads, which many consider to be a replacement for Twitter, then-CEO Elon Musk defended his new platform against Meta in a letter sent to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg by Twitter lawyer Alex Spiro. Threatened to sue the farm.
Meta is trying to take on Elon Musk’s Twitter by leveraging Instagram’s billions of users and threads that already — which launched Wednesday — have logged more than 30 million signups.
In his letter, Spiro accused Metta of hiring former Twitter employees who “had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information,” news website Semaphore previously reported.
“Twitter intends to vigorously enforce its intellectual property rights, and requires Meta to take immediate steps to stop using Twitter’s trade secrets or other highly confidential information,” Spiro wrote in the letter.
JEE News source confirmed its contents on Thursday. Sparrow did not respond to JEE News’ request for comment.
“No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — it’s just not a thing,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a Threads post.
A former senior Twitter employee told JEE News that he was not aware of any former staff working on Threads, nor of any senior officials who had landed at Meta.
Meanwhile, Twitter owner Musk responded to the news by tweeting, “Competition is OK, cheating is not.”
NEWS: Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over "systematic, willful and unlawful misappropriation" of Twitter's trade secrets and IP, as well as scraping of Twitter's data, in a cease-and-desist letter sent yesterday to Zuckerberg by Elon's lawyer Alex Spiro. pic.twitter.com/enWhnlYcAt
— T(w)itter Daily News  (@TitterDaily) July 6, 2023
Meta owns Facebook as well as Instagram.
Since Musk’s takeover of the social media platform last October, Twitter has faced competition from Mastodon and Blusky, among others. Threads’ user interface, however, is similar to that of a microblogging platform.
However, Threads does not support keyword searches or direct messages.
Intellectual property law experts, including Stanford law professor Mark Laemmli, said that to press a trade secret theft claim against Meta, Twitter would need more detail than what’s in the letter.
“Only the hiring of ex-Twitter employees (who themselves have left or been fired by Twitter) and the fact that Facebook has created a somewhat similar site support the trade secrets claim,” he said. Not likely.”
Companies accused of trade secret theft must demonstrate that they have made reasonable efforts to protect their corporate secrets, said Jane Frommer, a professor at New York University. The cases often revolved around secure systems that were compromised in some way.
The latest challenge to Twitter follows a series of tumultuous decisions that have alienated both users and advertisers, including Musk’s latest move to limit the number of tweets users can read per day.
