'Competition Is Fine, Cheating Is Not': Musk As Twitter Threatens To Sue Meta Over Rival Threads

Meta recently launched the Threads app which garnered 10 million users within hours. Now, Twitter has threatened to sue Meta over the same.

Twitter vs Meta over the launch of Threads app by Mark Zuckerberg. ( Image Source :Getty Images )

Twitter has threatened to sue Meta after the latter launched the Threads app attracting users. As lar Twitter News, the micro-blogging platform is threatening to sue Meta over "systematic, willful and unlawful misappropriation" of Twitter's trade secrets and IP, as well as scraping of Twitter's data. The same has been communicated to Mark Zuckerberg by Elon Musk's lawyer Alex Spiro. Reacting to the news, Musk said, "Competition is fine, cheating is not", hinting that a big legal battle is on the cards over Threads app.

Twitter claimed that Meta has violated Twitter’s “intellectual property rights”, reported The Guardian citing news outlet Semafor. Twitter Daily News tweeted the said letter in which Spiro said that Twitter “has serious concerns that Meta Platforms (Meta) has engaged in systematic, willful and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property”. 

Competition is fine, cheating is not

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 6, 2023

“Twitter intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights, and demands that Meta take immediate steps to stop using any Twitter trade secrets or other highly confidential information,” Alex Spiro wrote in the letter. 

The below is a leak of the letter sent by Spiro to Meta, as reported by @semafor.

The allegations centre on trade secrets shared by ex-Twitter employees hired by Meta, but also hints that Meta may have been scraping Twitter's data in violation of the terms of service. pic.twitter.com/Lo6usdsM7Q

— T(w)itter Daily News  (@TitterDaily) July 6, 2023

Notably, Meta launched Threads, a text-based conversation app intended to rival Twitter, on Wednesday. According to The Guardian, the company said Threads garnered 30 million sign-ups in less than 24 hours after launching, apparently making it the most rapidly downloaded app ever. Threads accounts are linked to Instagram profiles, making the process to sign up seamless between apps and giving the Twitter copycat a built-in user base. 

Zuckerberg said Threads was Meta’s attempt at taking a shot to build a “public conversations app with 1bn+ people” – an opportunity that Twitter had but “hasn’t nailed”. 

“This is as good of a start as we could have hoped for!” Zuckerberg added in a thread on Thursday. 

 Meanwhile, Twitter claimed in the cease-and-desist that Meta has poached dozens of former employees in the past year, some of whom “had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information” and “many” of whom have “improperly” kept Twitter documents or electronic devices. 

 “With that knowledge, Meta deliberately assigned these employees to develop, in a matter of months, Meta’s copycat ‘Threads’ app with the specific intent that they use Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property in order to accelerate the development of Meta’s competing app, in violation of both state and federal law as well as those employees’ ongoing obligations to Twitter,” the letter says. 

Twitter further added that Meta was “prohibited” from scraping data from any Twitter service.