‘Thread’: Elon Musk To Sue Mark Zuckerberg Over New Text-based Platform

The gigantic social media platform, Twitter is threatening legal action against Meta over its new text-based platform, accusing the social media giant of poaching former employees to create a “copycat” application for social media use.

On Wednesday, 5th of July, 2023, the Instagram parent company Meta introduced a new platform, Threads, a text-based companion to Instagram that resembles Twitter and other text-based social platforms.

On Thursday, which is the 6th of July, 2023, the Chief Executive Officer, CEO Zuckerberg announced that Threads had already signed up 30 million users in its first day, vastly dwarfing competitors, freshreporters media reports.

Now, a lawyer for Twitter, Identified as Alex Spiro, has sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg accusing the company of engaging in “systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property.”

“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,” Spiro wrote in a letter obtained exclusively by Semafor.

 “Twitter reserves all rights, including, but not limited to, the right to seek both civil remedies and injunctive relief without further notice to prevent any further retention, disclosure, or use of its intellectual property by Meta.”

Spiro who is the lawyer accused Meta platform of hiring dozens of former Twitter employees who “had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information.”

He also alleged that Meta assigned those former employees to develop “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.”

Responding to the letter, one of the Meta source revealed to Semafor that Twitter’s accusations are baseless.

“No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing,” the source said.

The ‘Bird app’ letter is an early sign that Threads is the most serious rival yet to Elon Musk’s platform.

Since Elon Musk took over the Twitter platform last year, the platform has reduced user experience and also turned to a hub for right wing activity.