In a recent social media post, Elon Musk, the executive chairman of Twitter, accused Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg of “cheating” in relation to the release of Meta’s new text-based social network called Threads. While Musk expressed his acceptance of healthy competition, he made it clear that cheating would not be tolerated.
The accusation follows a letter sent by Twitter lawyer Alex Spiro to Mark Zuckerberg, threatening legal action against Meta. In the letter, Spiro stated that Twitter intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights and demanded that Meta immediately cease using Twitter’s trade secrets. According to Spiro, Meta had hired former Twitter employees who had access to confidential information, including trade secrets. These employees were allegedly assigned by Meta to develop Threads, which Spiro referred to as a “copycat” application. It was claimed that Meta used Twitter’s trade secrets and intellectual property to expedite the development of their competing app.
Additionally, Spiro’s letter served as a formal notice to Meta, requesting the preservation of any documents relevant to the dispute between Twitter and Meta, as well as retaining records of former Twitter employees now working for Meta. Spiro also emphasized that Meta is prohibited from engaging in crawling or scraping Twitter’s followers or following data without prior consent.
On July 5, Meta released Threads in 100 countries, just days after Twitter’s rate limit incident where the platform temporarily imposed restrictions on the number of posts users could read.