Twitter threatened to sue Meta Platforms over Threads. Alex Spiro, a lawyer for Twitter, sent a letter to Mark Zuckerberg. Semafor, a news website, reported that the lawyer accused Meta of employing ex-Twitter members who “had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information.”
Alex Spiro says
He wrote “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,” in the letter. The content was even confirmed by a Reuters source on Thursday who knows about the letter. When Reuters tried to extract a response from Spiro, he did not respond.
Meta says
On the other hand, Andy Stone, Meta spokesperson, said, No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing,” in a Threads post. In the meantime, Elon Musk tweeted, “Competition is fine, cheating is not” responding to a tweet citing the news.
Twitter vs other platforms
Meta owns Facebook, Instagram, and now Threads. Bluesky and Mastodon among others have been giving strong competition to Twitter since Musk took over the platform last year. Threads’ UI resembles Twitter for sure. However, direct messages and keyword searches are not supported by Threads yet.
Experts say
For Twitter to claimtrade secrets theft and press charges on Meta, they would need a lot more detail than that mentioned in the letter. Mark Lemley, a Stanford law professor said, “The mere hiring of former Twitter employees (who Twitter itself laid off or drove away) and the fact that Facebook created a somewhat similar site is unlikely to support a trade secrets claim.” Many law experts are of the same opinion.
Jeanne Fromer said that organizations must confirm making reasonable efforts to safeguard their corporate secrets before they allege trade secrets theft. She is a professor at New York University.
Threads, launched by Meta on Wednesday, got more than 30 million sign-ups already. It could take on Twitter in no time leveraging billions of users on Instagram.
