Posted on 07/06/23
| News Source: FOX45
Billionaire Elon Musk's Twitter is reportedly threatening to sue Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta over its new platform, "Threads."
Twitter attorney Alex Spiro sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday detailing the social media giant's issues with the new platform, according to the publication Semafor.
Meta is accused of poaching former Twitter employees to create a "copycat" platform, Semafor's Max Tani writes in his article. Semafor obtained a copy of the letter and featured it in its Thursday article.
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 reportedly wrote in a letter to Zuckerberg.
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 letter also says according to Semafor.
Spiro's alleged letter accuses Zuckerberg and Meta of hiring dozens of ex-Twitter employees who "had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information" and then assigned those ex-Twitter employees to make "Meta’s copycat ‘Threads’ app."
Twitter's "trade secrets and other intellectual property" were used to "accelerate the development of Meta’s competing app," Spiro reportedly claims, adding that doing so was "in violation of both state and federal law as well as those employees’ ongoing obligations to Twitter.”
Semafor reports that a source from Meta denies those accusations, calling them baseless.
No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing," the Meta source reportedly claims.
"Threads," which is tied to Meta's Instagram userbase of over a billion people, has so far attained over 30 million sign-ups since launching on Wednesday, according to Reuters.
The New York Times calls the new platform a "Twitter killer," and Spiro's letter is "an early sign that Threads is the most serious rival yet to Musk’s chaotic, but still-central, platform," according to Semafor.