Those who keep up with tech-related news may know there’s a new social media platform in town called Threads. It was launched by Instagram and looks remarkably similar to Twitter.
So similar, in fact, that Twitter has now threatened to sue Meta — Instagram’s parent company.
In a recent tweet, Twitter owner Elon Musk has also seemingly accused folks at Threads of “cheating”.
A lawyer’s letter was reportedly sent to Mr Mark Zuckerberg, chairman and CEO of Meta, on Wednesday (5 July).
According to a copy of the letter posted by global news platform Semafor, it was from a lawyer named Alex Spiro who was acting on behalf of Twitter.
Source: Souvik Banerjee on Unsplash
The letter was cc’ed to Mr Musk and Meta’s chief legal officer Jennifer Newstead.
In the letter, Mr Spiro said Twitter was concerned that Meta — which owns Facebook and Instagram — had allegedly engaged in “systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property”.
As an example of this, he cited that Meta had allegedly hired “dozens” of ex-Twitter employees.
These former staff “had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information”, the letter added.
He also alleged that these individuals had “improperly retained Twitter documents and electronic devices”.
The lawyer then proceeded to accuse Meta of “deliberately” instructing them to develop Threads — a “copycat” app, he noted.
Source: @telegramcollective, @uchify.sg & @zulasg on Threads
Their intention was to use Twitter’s intellectual property to accelerate the development of Threads, Mr Spiro claimed.
This is in violation of state and federal law, he maintained.
Mr Spiro warned that Twitter intends to “strictly enforce” its intellectual property rights.
Thus, they demanded that Meta “take immediate steps to stop using any Twitter trade secrets or other highly confidential information”.
Twitter reserves the right to “seek both civil remedies and injunctive relief”, among other rights, the letter said, adding,
Further, Meta is expressly prohibited from engaging in any crawling or scraping of Twitter’s followers or following data.
Following the letter’s issuance, Meta’s Communications Director Andy Stone told Semafor that the accusations were “baseless”.
Source: Google Maps
He denied that anybody on the Threads engineering team was a former Twitter employee, adding,
That’s just not a thing.
However, Mr Musk is obviously unconvinced.
On Friday (7 July), he sent out a tweet in response to Semafor’s article, appearing to succinctly highlight the importance of fair competition.
Source: Elon Musk on Twitter
He said that “cheating” isn’t fine, seemingly accusing his rivals of doing just that.
According to the BBC, more features are in the works for Threads, such as interacting with people on other social media apps like Mastodon.
The timing of the launch is said to be a “Twitter killer” moment by investors, as Twitter users are still reeling from Mr Musk’s recently imposed restrictions on the number of tweets they can read daily.
The move was reportedly his last attempt at getting users to sign up for its subscription service, Twitter Blue. It also did not help that the app’s popular user dashboard TweetDeck will be locked behind a paywall.
Making the rivalry more intense, Mr Musk and Mr Zuckerberg appeared to have agreed to engage in a cage fight last month.
Seems like while the physical altercation is yet to take place, legal fisticuffs have already begun.
What’s left is for the rest of us to break out the popcorn and watch the fireworks.
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Featured image adapted from Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash, Google Maps and Elon Musk on Twitter.
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