Elon Musk threatens Meta with legal action after Threads, Meta’s new Twitter rival, launched to much fanfare. Everything now indicates that Twitter considers the application to be a real threat.
Twitter threatened to sue Meta over its new Threads app, which Mark Zuckerberg has openly called a rival, claiming the company violated Twitter’s “intellectual property rights.” Indeed, as we have seen in our own Threads hands-on, the application strongly resembles that of Elon Musk.
In a letter, addressed to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter attorney Alex Spiro, claims that Meta used Twitter trade secrets to create Threads. The new social network had managed to attract more than 10 million users in just 7 hours, and now has more than 30 million.
Meta allegedly ‘stole’ ex-Twitter employees
Maître Spiro, who is also Elon Musk’s personal lawyer, also claims that Meta hired “dozens” of ex-Twitter employees to develop Threads. This is ultimately not so surprising, since Elon Musk had laid off hundreds of employees after buying the social network for 44 billion dollars last year.
The lawyer alleges that these former employees ” improperly stored documents and electronic devices from Twitter and that Meta has ” deliberately involved these employees in the development of Threads.
Spiro did not say whether the bluebird company would take legal action.but said that ” Twitter reserves all rights, including but not limited to the right to seek civil remedies and injunctive relief without further notice. “. For his part, Meta also defended himself. ” No one on Threads’ engineering team is a former Twitter employee – that’s just not true “, according to Andy Stone, director of communications.
Elon Musk also had a field day criticizing Threads on Twitter. According to the billionaire, the application keeps too much personal data of its users, and its algorithm is dangerous. ” A closed-source system, based purely on algorithms, means the manipulation of information people see is essentially undetectable “, he says. As a reminder, it is currently for example Can’t customize your news feed to only show posts from your friends.
