Twitter has issued a legal warning to its competitor Meta, Semafor continued 6th of July.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, previously launched the Threads app. The product has been widely described as a Twitter competitor or “Twitter-killer”, something Twitter itself has taken note of.
Alex Spiro, a lawyer for Twitter, sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg after the platform’s launch. That letter calls Threads a “copycat” app and says:
“Based on recent reports regarding your recently launched ‘Threads’ app, Twitter is deeply concerned that Meta… has engaged in systematic, willful and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property.”
Spiro also argued that Meta deliberately hired numerous former Twitter employees. Those employees, Spiro claimed, used trade secrets and insider information to further Threads’ development. Those actions would violate both state and federal law, as well as employees’ ongoing obligations to Twitter, Spiro said.
Spiro’s letter added that Twitter is committed to “strictly enforcing its intellectual property rights” and demanded that Meta stop using Twitter-derived trade secrets or confidential information. Spiro warned that Twitter reserves the right to take legal action, including both civil and injunctive remedies, to prevent further use of its IP.
Other stakeholders have also commented on the matter. Elon Musk, CTO and executive chairman of Twitter, implicitly supported the legal threat in a July 6 tweet. He wrote: “competition is fine, cheating is not.”
Meta’s communications director, Andy Stone, denied the claims. He explicitly stated to Semafor that there are no former Twitter employees on the Threads team.
Twitter is experiencing broader problems
Twitter placed a speed limit on viewable content days before Meta’s Threads went live and said this limit was implemented to limit bot activity.
The company didn’t explicitly say it had imposed the limit pending the launch of Threads. However, Spiro’s letter also ordered Meta to refrain from scraping or crawling Twitter data, suggesting that the two companies are at least side by side.
Twitter has faced a host of other controversies since Elon Musk acquired the company in October 2022. Certain issues — notably less restrictive content policies that some argue allow hate speech — have previously pushed users to move to decentralized social media alternatives like Mastodon.
Some crypto hopefuls believe that backlash against Twitter could benefit Web3 and blockchain-based social networks, such as Peepeth, Lens Protocol, and Damus.