Twitter, presumably reeling from the launch of Meta’s new Threads app, has threatened the Mark Zuckerberg-owned company with a lawsuit claiming intellectual property theft and misappropriation of trade secrets.
Alex Spiro, long-time lawyer for Twitter boss Elon Musk (pictured), wrote to Zuckerberg that following the launch of Threads, Meta has “engaged in systematic, willful and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property.”
In a deliciously ironic twist, Spiro went on to say “Over the past year, Meta has hired dozens of former Twitter employees” and that these ex-staffers continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and confidential information. Perhaps Musk is regretting making tens of thousands of Twitter staff redundant?
Regardless, Spiro claimed that these staff still have ongoing obligations to Twitter and that “many” have kept hold of internal company documents and Twitter-owned devices.
He alleges that Meta deliberately used this information to develop Threads “in a matter of months” and, as a result, the company violated both state and federal law. However, he provided no evidence to support his claims.
If that wasn’t enough, Spiro goes on to say that Meta has been crawling or scraping Twitter’s followers or following data in violation of its terms of service.
Meta communications director Andy Stone responded to the letter on Threads saying “No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing.”
Twitter’s CEO, and former NBCUniversal ad boss, Linda Yaccarino said that “We’re often imitated — but the Twitter community can never be duplicated.”
Here at B&T, we expect that the top brass (or what’s left of it) at Twitter will continue to throw their toys out of the pram while Meta’s bosses try to bat away any negative press.
Threads launched yesterday to much fanfare and in a blaze of notifications as millions of people signed up with their existing Instagram accounts within the first few hours.
