Twitter threatens Meta with court for “copying” social network Threads
Elon Musk’s lawyer Alex Spiro, in a letter addressed to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, claims that the company used “Twitter’s trade secrets and intellectual property.”
The letter says that Meta hired “dozens” of ex-Twitter employees to develop Threads (which is not surprising, given how many people Elon Musk fired after the acquisition), who still had access to confidential information and trade secrets of the social network. Twitter claims that Meta took advantage of this and instructed these employees to develop a “copycat program” that violates “state and federal law.”
Meta is required to immediately stop using confidential information and copying Twitter data, otherwise the company will take legal action.
Andy Stone, Meta’s communications director, responded to the letter on Threads:
“There are no former Twitter employees on the Threads engineering team.”
Meta doesn’t seem too concerned about a possible lawsuit, given how often Twitter likes to threaten to sue. In May, the company accused Microsoft of misusing Twitter’s API through integration with some products.
“Competition is good, fraud is not,” Musk wrote on Twitter.
Meta has been developing Threads since January 2023 and eventually launched the web version on July 5 in the evening, followed by the mobile app. Within the first 7 hours, 10 million people joined the social network, and within a day their number reached 30 million. At the same time, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced an ambitious goal of 1 billion users. For comparison, the competitor Twitter currently has more than 400 million users.
The Threads interface is indeed very similar to Twitter (Instagam CEO Adam Mosseri even agreed to the users’ suggestion to call “local” posts tweets). Here you can post photos, text (up to 500 characters), and videos (up to 5 minutes long). In future updates, the developers promise to add a separate feed for friends’ posts), editing and translation functions, as well as the ability to maintain multiple accounts and switch between them.
Threads is currently available in the US and more than 100 other countries, but not in the EU.
