Twitter threatens to sue 'newbie' app Threads for stealing trade secrets

On the same day that tech mogul Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta launched its Threads social network, a Silicon Valley law firm representing Elon Musk sent Meta a letter accusing the app of “systematically, willfully, and unlawfully misappropriating” Twitter’s intellectual property, data, and trade secrets.

The letter from Alex Spiro, a lawyer at the firm Quinn Emanuel, was sent to Mr. Zuckerberg and Meta’s chief legal officer, Jennifer Newstead, on July 5.

Spiro's attorney claims that Meta hired dozens of former Twitter employees — who had access to the company's trade secrets — and then stole the data to "copycat" the development of Threads.

“Twitter intends to vigorously enforce its intellectual property rights and requires Meta to take immediate action to stop using any of Twitter’s trade secrets or other highly confidential information,” Mr. Spiro wrote.

Mr. Elon Musk himself commented on the content surrounding the above threatening lawsuit letter as follows: "Competition is good, cheating is not."

Meta spokesman Andy Stone denied Twitter’s allegations. “No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee,” he said.

On July 5, Mr. Zuckerberg launched Threads, an app designed quite similar to the social network “bluebird”, offering users the ability to transfer all data from Instagram. Instagram is another platform owned by Meta. After one day of launching, this “rookie” app had more than 30 million registered users. The application’s rollout in Europe has been delayed due to privacy concerns.

In late June, Twitter CEO Elon Musk imposed a limit on the number of tweets users could read in a day. He explained that the temporary measure was designed to combat “data harvesting and system manipulation.” He also disabled the ability to read Twitter without a logged-in account.

Federal regulators have previously kept a close eye on Meta for its tendency to buy competitors or create similar products to put them out of business. The company, which began life as Facebook, bought Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014. It has since launched Instagram Stories to compete with Snapchat and Facebook Reels to rival TikTok.

According to a blog post by Meta, the new Threads platform is similar to Twitter in that it allows users to post short posts of up to 500 characters, which can include links, images, and videos up to 5 minutes long. Users can interact with these posts by liking, retweeting, or replying, but they cannot message other accounts directly.

While Threads is a standalone app, users can log in using their Instagram information and follow the same account, which can make accessing Threads much more convenient.

The link between the two apps is also guaranteed to be private, as users can choose to make the link public. Instagram is a photo and video sharing social networking service with 2 billion monthly active accounts. In fact, Meta only needs to attract a quarter of Instagram users to Threads to compete with Twitter in terms of scale, said Jasmine Enberg, an analyst at Insider Intelligence.

According to Tin Tuc Newspaper