Twitter’s lawyer wrote a letter to the father of Facebook Goal on Wednesday, accusing the company of “systematic” and “illegal” “misappropriation” of trade secrets following the release of its Threads service.
The long time letter Elon Musk Lawyer Alex Spiro alleged that Meta’s new Twitter clone was created by former Twitter employees “deliberately assigned” to develop a “copycat” app. Semafor was the first to report the letter.
Spiro offered no concrete examples of Twitter employees using trade secrets to create the app, which made it notch. millions of users a few hours after its launch. But the message, sent the same day Threads went public, shows Musk’s level of concern given Meta’s user base and technical capabilities.
“No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee,” Andy Stone, director of communications for Meta, posted in threads. “That’s just not a thing.”
Since Musk’s $44 billion purchase of Twitter in October, the site has been plagued with challenges, including some advertisers suspending their campaigns. Musk has drastically reduced the size of the company, leaving it slow to respond to failures.
Spiro said Meta is “expressly prohibited” from tracking or scraping the data of Twitter followers, without providing evidence that Meta engaged in such activity. Musk previously alleged that the scraping of Twitter user data occurred on a large scale, though he, too, failed to show specific examples.
On Thursday, Twitter’s new CEO, Linda Yaccarino, tweeted that the company was “often imitated,” a clear reference to Threads.
Threads has already launched with representation from major brands and celebrities. The app still lacks some critical featuresincluding a web app, and still no revenue.
