Meta rolled out a Twitter imitation on Wednesday called Threads, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg claiming that within hours of its launch, 5 million users had already signed up. That number quickly reached 30 million, he later said.
In response, Elon Musk was quick to laugh about how it's essentially a place where people are copying and pasting content from Twitter and agreed with a Jack Dorsey tweet that Thread users' data belongs to Meta. Behind the scenes, however, Twitter's lawyers were busy drafting up a cease-and-desist letter.
In the July 5 message, Twitter expressed its "serious concerns" that Meta "has engaged in systematic, willful and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter's trade secrets and other intellectual property" and said, "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."
The letter continued, "Over the past year, Meta has hired dozens of Twitter employees," and "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 laws as well as those employees' ongoing obligations to Twitter."
The below is a leak of the letter sent by Spiro to Meta, as reported by @semafor.
— T(w)itter Daily News (@TitterDaily) July 6, 2023
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
Meta spokesman Andy Stone hit back, writing on Threads, "No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that's just not a thing."
But Musk doubled down, responding to news of the letter: "Competition is fine, cheating is not."
Competition is fine, cheating is not
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 6, 2023
The legal storm brewing between the two social media companies is just the latest development in an ongoing feud between the tech titans that recently culminated with talk of a potential cage match.