Twitter Gets Feisty: Seeking Legal Action Over Meta’s Threads App
The launch of Threads, Instagram’s answer to Twitter, may lead to a legal showdown between Elon Musk’s Twitter and Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta.
Earlier this week, Meta’s Instagram unveiled Threads, a text-focused social app riding on Instagram’s existing infrastructure and user base. According to Zuckerberg, the app already boasted over 30 million sign-ups as of Thursday morning.
According to Semafor (a new news platform), in a cease-and-desist letter dated July 5, Twitter’s legal representative accused Meta of “serious concerns.” More specifically, over the alleged deliberate and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and intellectual property. The letter warned that Twitter intends to aggressively protect its rights. They demanded immediate action from Meta to stop using any “confidential information” belonging to Twitter.
The letter also claimed that Meta had intentionally recruited a significant number of Twitter employees over the past year. (It’s worth mentioning that Musk noted in an interview with the BBC in April that he fired about 80% of the company’s staff.) The letter says that Meta quickly assigned them to develop a copycat app called Threads. They argue that this is a violation of both state and federal laws. Twitter also argues that this is a violation of the obligations these employees had to the company.
In response, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone referred to a Threads post, denying that any members of the Threads engineering team were former Twitter employees.
Elon Musk chimed in on Twitter, stating, “Competition is fine, cheating is not,” in response to Twitter’s legal threat against Meta.
Musk acquired Twitter in a $44 billion deal in October 2022. Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino, who recently joined the company after leaving NBCUniversal, posted a tweet on Thursday indirectly referencing Threads, emphasizing the uniqueness and irreplaceability of the Twitter community.
