Twitter has issued a warning of potential legal action against Meta’s Threads app, a newly launched competitor to the popular microblogging site. This move comes in response to Meta’s claim of acquiring a staggering 30 million users within its first day, overshadowing its rivals.
Allegations of Trade Secret Theft and Staff Poaching
A letter addressed to Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg accuses the company of unlawfully appropriating trade secrets through the employment of former Twitter employees. The letter, revealed by Semafor reports, claims that Meta intentionally hired individuals who had access to Twitter’s confidential information and trade secrets.
Twitter’s Assertion and Call for Action
In a tweet, Elon Musk, owner of Twitter, emphasized the importance of fair competition and condemned any form of cheating. Twitter’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, further elaborated on the allegations, asserting that Meta engaged in systematic and willful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and intellectual property.
Spiro also warned Meta that Twitter reserved the right to pursue civil remedies and seek injunctive relief to prevent the continued use or disclosure of its intellectual property.
Spiro’s letter highlights that Meta is not allowed to crawl or scrape data about Twitter’s followers or following. According to Twitter’s Terms of Service, crawling is only allowed if it follows the rules in the robots.txt file, which specifically forbids crawling follower or following data. Scraping Twitter services without their permission is strictly forbidden.
Meta’s App Development and Violation of Obligations
The letter alleges that Meta deliberately assigned former Twitter employees to develop a copycat app called ‘Threads’ with the intention of leveraging Twitter’s trade secrets and intellectual property to expedite Meta’s own app development. Such actions are deemed as violations of state and federal laws, as well as the ongoing obligations these employees have towards Twitter.
In a letter to Meta, Alex Spiro, an outside lawyer for Twitter, stated:
This letter serves as formal notice for Meta to preserve any documents that may be relevant to a dispute between Twitter, Meta, and/or former Twitter employees now employed by Meta.
This includes, but is not limited to, all documents related to the recruitment, hiring, and onboarding of these former Twitter employees, the development of Meta’s competing Threads app, and any communications between these former Twitter employees and any agent, representative, or employee of Meta.
In a statement to Semafor, Andy Stone, the communications director for Meta, refuted:
Twitter’s accusations as being without merit. The claim that the Threads engineering team includes former Twitter employees is simply untrue.