Twitter threatens trade secret lawsuit over Meta’s Threads app

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Twitter has threatened to sue Meta alleging it stole the company’s trade secrets when creating its rival messaging app Threads, after the new platform attracted millions of users within hours of its launch. .

Meta unveiled Threads on Wednesday as a competitor to Elon Musk’s Twitter. Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said on Thursday that more than 30 million people had signed up in less than 24 hours after it launched, making OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT the fastest-downloaded consumer app at launch. As is on the way to cross.

In a letter addressed to Zuckerberg on Wednesday, Twitter lawyer Alex Spiro accused Meta of engaging in a “systemic, deliberate and illegal misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property.”

The letter claimed that Meta had hired “dozens” of former Twitter employees with access to highly confidential information about the platform, many of whom “improperly retained Twitter documents and electronic equipment”. .

Twitter alleged that Meta intentionally instructed these employees to create threads “in violation of both state and federal law”.

Twitter and Meta declined to comment. The letter was first reported by Semaphore and confirmed by two people familiar with the matter.

Musk, the billionaire founder of Tesla, who bought Twitter in October for $44 billion, responded to a Twitter user who shared the news: “Competition is fine, cheating is not.”

On Threads, Meta communications director Andy Stone highlighted a quote in the Semaphore report, which was attributed to an unnamed Meta source and read: “There are no former Twitter employees on the Threads engineering team — it doesn’t matter. “

Threads is a “text-based conversation app” where users are able to publish posts up to 500 characters long and include links, photos, and videos. Like Twitter, posts can be replied to, liked or shared by others. Some users have dubbed the service the “Twitter killer”.

The app, which still lacks some of Twitter’s functionality, is tied directly to Instagram, allowing users to port their usernames and contacts over to existing networks. “It’s as good a start as we could have hoped for!” Zuckerberg wrote on the app, calling it a “friendly” alternative to Twitter.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT took five days to reach 1 million users. It has set a record as the fastest growing consumer app ever after reaching 100 million monthly active users in two months, according to UBS analysts. The growth rate of Threads suggests that it will reach that limit in a few days.

The threads blew up because Musk has alienated some users and advertisers with his decision to reduce the platform’s moderation and implement disruptive changes to the product and its policies with little warning or explanation.

For example, over the weekend, Musk drew criticism from some Twitter users after he implemented temporary limits on the number of posts users could see, addressing what he said were “extreme levels of data scraping (and) system manipulation”. There was an attempt to

Musk has also furloughed about 80 percent of Twitter’s staff and ordered dramatic cost-cutting measures in a bid to pull the company back from the brink of bankruptcy.

In the letter, Twitter said it is calling on Meta to “take immediate steps to cease using any Twitter trade secrets and other highly confidential information,” while reserving the right to seek “both civil remedies and injunctive relief.” Is. It also warned Meta that it is “expressly prohibited from engaging in crawling or scraping Twitter’s followers or data in any way”.