By Isabelle Wilson-
Twitter has sent Meta a cease-and-desist letter over the newly launched Threads app, sources.
The letter accuse Meta of misappropriating Twitter’s trade secrets and claims Meta hired former Twitter employees who retained proprietary information, the sources said.
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In a letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, first published by the news outlet Semafor, a lawyer for Twitter said the company “has serious concerns that Meta Platforms (Meta) has engaged in systematic, wilful and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property”.
“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,” Alex Spiro wrote in the letter.
“Over the past year, Meta has hired dozens of former Twitter employees,” the letter, signed by lawyer Alex Spiro, reads. “Twitter knows that these employees previously worked at Twitter; that these employees had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information; that these employees owe ongoing obligations to Twitter; and that many of these employees have improperly retained Twitter documents and electronic devices.”
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It continues, “With that knowledge, Meta deliberately assigned these employees to develop, in a matter of months, 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.”
Elon Musk wrote on Twitter, “Competition is fine, cheating is not.”
Andy Stone, a spokesperson for Meta, said in a post on Threads, “No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing.”
Threads, which is built off the existing Instagram app, has been extremely popular in its first 24 hours since release.
Social media stars began flocking to the platform late Wednesday when it launched. Kim Kardashian had amassed 1.7 million followers by Thursday afternoon, while singer Shakira had 1.4 million
In response to the letter, Meta’s communications director, Andy Stone, posted on Threads that there are no engineers on the team that used to work at Twitter.
Twitter did not preent evidence it has to support its claim that former employees who now work at Meta continue to have access to Twitter intellectual property or trade secrets. Twitter responded to a request for comment with an automated email of a poop emoji.
Twitter also said Meta was “prohibited” from scraping data from any Twitter service. Twitter’s owner, Elon Musk, has recently made several moves to purportedly curtail any efforts to scrape Twitter data, including limiting the number of tweets users can see in a day. At the time, Musk said it was in response to companies using Twitter to train their AI models.
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