Elon Musk’s Twitter is threatening legal action against Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta over the Big Tech giant’s new text-based “Twitter killer” platform Threads.
On Thursday, Facebook’s parent company launched Threads, a censored text-based Twitter clone connected to Instagram.
Hours after the launch, Elon Musk made his move.
A lawyer for Twitter, Alex Spiro, sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg accusing the company of engaging in “systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property.”
The letter says: “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.
“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 accuses Meta of hiring dozens of former Twitter employees who “had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information.”
The letter also alleged that Zuckerberg used those ex-Twitter employees to develop, “Meta’s copycat ‘Threads’ app with the specific intent that they use Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property in order to accelerate the development of Meta’s competing app, in violation of both state and federal law as well as those employees’ ongoing obligations to Twitter.”
BREAKING: Twitter threatens to sue Meta over Threads, Reuters are reporting via Semafor https://t.co/PAiZ4D1jU3
📺 Sky 501, Virgin 602, Freeview 233 and YouTube pic.twitter.com/2SIhAmqrws
— Sky News (@SkyNews) July 6, 2023
BREAKING: Twitter threatens to sue Meta over Threads https://t.co/KOlOhTX0Fa pic.twitter.com/ExyVt0cRZD
— The Messenger (@TheMessenger) July 6, 2023
A Meta source denied Musk’s allegations saying:
“No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee, that’s just not a thing.”
Zuckerberg announced today Threads had signed up 30 million users on its first day.
