Twitter claims Meta hired “dozens” of its ex-employees.
Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over concerns about its new Threads app, according to a letter obtained by Semafor. In the letter, which is addressed to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter lawyer Alex Spiro argues that Meta used Twitter’s trade secrets and intellectual property to build Threads.
Spiro, who is also Elon Musk’s personal lawyer and a partner at the Quinn Emanuel law firm, claims that Meta hired “dozens” of ex-Twitter employees to develop Threads, which wouldn’t be all that surprising given just how many people were fired following Musk’s takeover.
But according to Twitter, many of these former workers still have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other confidential information. Twitter alleges that Meta took advantage of this and tasked these employees with developing a “copycat” app “in violation of both state and federal law.”
As a result, Twitter is threatening legal action in the form of “both civil remedies and injunctive relief.” It also “demands that Meta take immediate steps to stop using any Twitter trade secrets or other highly confidential information” and says Meta isn’t allowed to crawl or scrape Twitter’s data, either.
Meta responded to Twitter’s letter in a post on Threads, with communications director Andy Stone stating, “No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing.” Meta doesn’t seem all too concerned about this, and that may be because Twitter isn’t all that shy about threatening legal action. In May, Twitter accused Microsoft of abusing the company’s API through integrations with some of its products.
Meta launched Threads on Wednesday night, with celebrities and brands the first to get on board. Less than 24 hours since the app’s launch, Threads has garnered over 30 million registered users, while internal data obtained by The Verge’s Alex Heath indicates that users have already made over 95 million threads.
“Competition is fine, cheating is not,” Musk said in a reply to a post about the letter on Twitter.
who knew that firing all your dev’s with no severance would backfire on you.
Sorry, If you ignore all employee protections, and fire people and refuse to pay them what they are owed, you can not really complain about them using those skills elsewhere including things they learned in your company.
Well Twitter, Spotify, and Netflix are all like standard system design/architecture case studies and interview questions. Pretty sure Twitter has been invented like 300,000 times in various iterations. It’s not exactly like CocaCola’s recipe.
I think he literally fired the PR department at Twitter, and all emails from press are auto-replied to with a poop emoji. The man is such an unfunny child.
Such a dick too, like first you get fired because he doesn’t understand the business he bought and is cheap, then he acts like the employees were fired for being inadequate.
I’ve gotten some decent use from Twitter over the years, and it was nice they doubled the character count, but I very much prefer places where I can read and post over one paragraph at a time. The concept of 140 characters sort of made sense when it was based on MMS, but it’s not clear if anyone ever even used that after the first couple of years. People would make longer posts by replying to themselves and chaining a dozen posts, but that is an excruciating interface for something that could just be one long post. Plus then people could “like” and reply to each segment individually which is sort of chaotic.
Reddit was the only social-media like site that was geared towards and appropriate for having longer discussions, but it seems like the owners want to dumb it down into TikTok/9Gag. I’m glad Lemmy is here for people who want to use a bunch of words at once and express complete thoughts.
It depends on what you’re looking for. For me, Twitter is basically an RSS feed of news and people I want to hear from. It’s not a social media network for me. That’s why all I want is a reverse chronological feed.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !technology@lemmy.world
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Not very good trade secrets if Zuck knew them!
Didn’t know that Fedverse technology was one of Twitter’s trade secrets. LOL.
Next he’s going to sue whoever he can because email already exists! And we type! With words! LAWSUIT
Elon can fucking suck it. Loser.
Well Elon… You could’ve avoided this if you just didn’t laid them off as soon as you bought Twitter
mama says no
Trade secrets? Is Threads already delinquent on some vendor payments too?
who knew that firing all your dev’s with no severance would backfire on you.
Sorry, If you ignore all employee protections, and fire people and refuse to pay them what they are owed, you can not really complain about them using those skills elsewhere including things they learned in your company.
Where is Elon’s PR department? Man won’t stop tarnishing his own reputation.
I’m fairly sure it doesn’t take trade secrets to build a Twitter clone.
Well Twitter, Spotify, and Netflix are all like standard system design/architecture case studies and interview questions. Pretty sure Twitter has been invented like 300,000 times in various iterations. It’s not exactly like CocaCola’s recipe.
Just get your 🍿 ready
I think he literally fired the PR department at Twitter, and all emails from press are auto-replied to with a poop emoji. The man is such an unfunny child.
deleted by creator
Do it. Let the rich eat themselves.
Such a dick too, like first you get fired because he doesn’t understand the business he bought and is cheap, then he acts like the employees were fired for being inadequate.
I hope someone sent him this with a “this you?”
Is there anyway I could pin this comment? 😂
Does anyone else feel like the core concept of Twitter is not really that interesting in the first place
I’ve gotten some decent use from Twitter over the years, and it was nice they doubled the character count, but I very much prefer places where I can read and post over one paragraph at a time. The concept of 140 characters sort of made sense when it was based on MMS, but it’s not clear if anyone ever even used that after the first couple of years. People would make longer posts by replying to themselves and chaining a dozen posts, but that is an excruciating interface for something that could just be one long post. Plus then people could “like” and reply to each segment individually which is sort of chaotic.
Reddit was the only social-media like site that was geared towards and appropriate for having longer discussions, but it seems like the owners want to dumb it down into TikTok/9Gag. I’m glad Lemmy is here for people who want to use a bunch of words at once and express complete thoughts.
Me think why waste time say lot word when few word do trick. When me president, they see, they see. -Wayne Gretzky -Michael Scott -Kevin Malone
It depends on what you’re looking for. For me, Twitter is basically an RSS feed of news and people I want to hear from. It’s not a social media network for me. That’s why all I want is a reverse chronological feed.
Twitter was an open canvas at first, that’s what made it appealing. The users shaped it and norms formed. Then the bad men came.
It’s not just you. Twitter doesn’t now and never did anything Facebook doesn’t already do. It’s just a pared down Facebook experience.
To you it is not.
deleted by creator
Imagine convincing a judge/jury that Facebook doesn’t know how to make a social media site with pictures, videos, and short posts lmao
Yeah lol. Also, like it’s some big trade secret how Twitter functions.
Musk is such a douche. Anyone with half a brain and a handful of resources was salivating at the thought of luring users to an alternative.
Jesus man.
Competition is fine. No not like that!
The shepherds battled for the sheep.
Meta’s legal team probably had a good laugh about that letter.