Twitter attorney Alex Spiro accuses Meta of poaching former employees and sharing trade secrets.
Twitter new rival, Threads is up for a legal battle.
The newly launch micro-blogging platform is being accused by the bird app of creating a copycat after gaining access to confidential information.
Twitter writes to Zuckerberg
Twitter’s attorney Alex Spiro has written Mark Zuckerberg that the company intends to enforce its intellectual property rights against the newly launched Threads platform.
According to a letter released on Thursday, the allegations leveled against the Meta boss and his Twitter-killer are that the company hired former Twitter employees who had access to and continued to have access to highly confidential information.
“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,” the letter read. “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, discourse, or use of its intellectual property by Meta.
The letter noted that Meta had deliberately hired former Twitter employees with wealth of knowledge about Twitter. These employees were then used to build Threads in a matter of months.
Meta launched Threads on Wednesday to positive reviews. The new social media platform is intended to take on Elon Musk’s Twitter by incorporating Instagram’s billions of users.
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone responded to the story in a post on Threads.
He wrote: “To be clear: ‘No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee – that’s just not a thing’.”
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Musk V. Zuckerberg
Since Musk took over, the bird app has faced an upheaval. The tech billionaire sacked over half of 8,000 employees following his $44B purchase in October last year.
Threads launch comes at a time when the Musk-owned platform has resorted to limiting tweet views for non-subscribers.
Within 7 hours of launch, Threads recorded over 10M new users.
Analysts have speculated that Threads’ connections to Instagram may provide it with a built-in user base and advertising infrastructure. That might steal advertising dollars from its rival at a time when its new CEO is attempting to turn around the company’s failing operations.
“Investors can’t help but be a little excited about the prospect that Meta really has a ‘Twitter-Killer’,” said Danni Hewson, head of financial analysis at investment firm AJ Bell.
Although Threads is a stand-alone app, users can log in using their Instagram credentials and follow the same profiles, potentially making it simple for Instagram’s more than 2 billion monthly active users to incorporate it into their routines.
“The cage match has started, and Zuckerberg delivered a major blow,” Insider Intelligence principal analyst Jasmine Enberg told Reuters.
“In many ways, it’s exactly what you’d expect from Meta: Stellar execution and an easy-to-navigate user interface,” she added.
Musk has taken to his platform to say his piece. The next few months will unveil more about the prospects Threads offers.
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