Twitter threatens lawsuit against Meta over Threads | Mashable.

Twitter threatens lawsuit against Meta over Threads

Elon Musk claims Mark Zuckerberg is "cheating" as tens of millions of users join Threads in less than 24 hours.

It's been less than a day since Meta's Threads launched, yet Twitter is already threatening to sue over it. Credit: Davide Bonaldo/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

It turns out that a fight between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg may not go down in a cage but in a courtroom.

Hours after Meta launched its new social media platform, a Twitter competitor called Threads, the CEO Mark Zuckerberg received a letter from a lawyer representing Twitter, threatening the company with legal action.

The two-page letter(opens in a new tab), obtained by Semafor(opens in a new tab), accuses Meta of hiring former Twitter employees in order to extract "trade secrets" and "highly confidential information" to create what Twitter refers to as a "copycat" app.

"Twitter has serious concerns that Meta Platforms has engaged in systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property," reads the opening statement in the letter sent by Twitter lawyer Alex Spiro.

Twitter goes on to allege that the employees hired by Meta "improperly retained Twitter documents and electronic devices" while working at Meta.

The letter also forbids Meta from scraping Twitter data, such as the follower information from Twitter users.

Twitter demands that Meta stops using the alleged Twitter "trade secrets" in the letter, and follows it up with a threat of legal action.

In response to one user tweeting about the letter, Twitter owner Elon Musk replied(opens in a new tab), "Competition is fine, cheating is not."

Some users were quick to point out a tweet from Musk back in November after a round of layoffs at Twitter.

"I would like to apologize for firing these geniuses," Musk said in response(opens in a new tab) to a tweet referencing critiques from the recently fired employees. "Their immense talent will no doubt be of great use elsewhere."

Twitter is now alleging that some of those employees did indeed take their talents elsewhere, to Meta, and is threatening a lawsuit over it.

However, Meta has already denied the allegations from Twitter.

“No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing," posted(opens in a new tab) Meta communications director Andy Stone.

In less than 24 hours, Threads has already amassed more than 30 million users thanks to its tight integration with Instagram. The Meta-owned app is easily the biggest competitor Twitter has faced yet.

Comments

  1. Yup he’s cheating alright how dare he Competently run his app that’s not playing fair

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. its cheating to insinuate that people have joined , because you force an upgrade on their facebook

      Delete
  2. There goes 40 billion investment

    ReplyDelete
  3. Bet the company on the fight. Put your wallets where your mouth is

    ReplyDelete
  4. Unfortunately it’s not available in my country.
    Reading this, I wanna download it too 😂😂👌🏽

    ReplyDelete
  5. I started to believe that Musk was for real, then a WEF insider became his new Twitter CEO. I don't understand why he bothers talking if his actions differ.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. He became a rightwing CHUD. Hypocrisy is kind of a requirement for the rightwing these days.

      Delete
  6. Well, looks like it doesn’t matter who’s in that cage fight, Zucks already won. I’m not a fan of billionaires, but I’m here with popcorn to watch them eat each other. 😉

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I was hoping for a fight to the death.

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    2. Twitter will be dead by the end of the year

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    3. deaths. Just weld the cage shut and never ever let them out, regardless of who wins the fight.

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    4. OK. I'm good with that.

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    5. Zuckerberg will lose both against Twitter and in the cage fight… 😂

      Delete
  7. It's almost adorable that Musk thinks Twitter is doing something unique.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. or that it’s not cheating if he just bought something someone else invented. So cute.

      Delete
    2. Sure. What's up?

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    3. well its long, can you please send me a request let's talk over massage dear

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    4. Well, it's not "cheating" per se, if it's done legally, but it's just insane that he thinks that there's something unique about letting people post online. That's really the only intersection I see between the two.

      Delete
  8. So Elon made a bunch of engineers at Twitter redundant, some with no notice, and tried to chicken out of paying their redundancy settlements.

    Meta then hired some of them, with a proportion going on to develop Threads. The nuts and bolts of a short message service agent very hard to cobble together, given there are several different ones in existence (Twitter, BlueSky, Mastodon [and Fediverse friends], Parler, Gab, Truth Social, Weibo...), so unless they copied Twitter code to their home devices then uploaded it to Meta (without changing variable and class names), it will be very difficult to prove causation rather than correlation caused by convergent evolution rather than copying.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. you never know, maybe Meta hacked Twitters GitHub account. 😆

      Delete
    2. Alternatively, whoever was left at Twitter wasn't too hasty about removing the accounts of their former colleagues... 😈

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    3. their source code was leaked on github a few months back so could be.

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    4. even if they did copy code, Twitter has made their code open source, so... Lol

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  9. Free market capitalism at work!

    ReplyDelete
  10. i joined just for that reason

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  11. Elon reading his proprietary agreement 😂
    https://media1.tenor.co/images/6338d1ee2ada1f24b16c1d8b9b87a429/tenor.gif?c=VjFfZmFjZWJvb2tfd2ViY29tbWVudHM&itemid=17050908

    ReplyDelete
  12. St Elmo paid $44B for a company that was worth about a third of that. With the introduction of Threads, Twitter is now worth about 3s 6d. (3 shillings sixpence. About 18½p in modern British currency; or about a quarter in American dollars and cents.)

    ReplyDelete
  13. Capitalists love the free market until the free market free markets

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. https://media1.tenor.co/images/b034b6a594cf0077adf704dfe5e80b67/tenor.gif?c=VjFfZmFjZWJvb2tfd2ViY29tbWVudHM&itemid=17150214

      Delete
  14. Didn't Elmo fire his legal team?

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  15. If Twitter were better, he wouldn’t be losing

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  16. ...aaaand they're gonna physically fight each other? 😂

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  17. What’s twitter never heard of it ?

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  18. Cheating? 😄😄

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. https://media.tenor.co/C3lj14Kch6sAAAAC/biden-confused.gif?t=AAX_5Eh0jTcFCAjbDgvrKg&c=VjFfZmFjZWJvb2s&itemid=25579397

      Delete
  19. I love how both of these people have the time to literally create/modify apps in a sort of ego battle while there are those of us literally just trying to live & make rent

    ReplyDelete
  20. the logo really are related, twitter is a bird, threads is the worm🤔

    ReplyDelete
  21. Threads is hardly different from Instagram.

    ReplyDelete
  22. Reaching for popcorn. Battle of the billionaires continues.

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  23. This is better than a “cage fight”.

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  24. Why do the care..🤔.. not money
    Egos... let go of my eggo

    ReplyDelete
  25. Cage fight to death to resolve this is the best way to go.

    ReplyDelete
  26. Excellent moment for that cage fight.

    ReplyDelete
  27. But add knives. Or chainsaws.

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  28. What trade secrets? 😂😂😂

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  29. I was thinking the same

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  30. It cost him $44 billion but at least he stopped that pesky kid posting real time location of his jet. Money well spent. 🤪🤪🤪

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  31. Jfc, Musk is such a baby.

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  32. Lawyers Love you both.Twitter ís a dead bird.
    https://media.tenor.co/z_zRRrprB-4AAAAM/pigeon-dead-pegion.gif?c=VjFfZmFjZWJvb2s&t=AAX_51VCu0MHAsMZbAniXQ&itemid=18542040

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  33. Sue them for what, exactly? Being competent and successful? 🥴😂

    ReplyDelete
  34. Sounds like trump with his witch hunt 😂😂

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  35. Emma Campbell and for that reason, I’m just away to make an account 😂

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  36. https://giphy.com/stickers/djr3hab-money-spending-r3hab-WQI0IwWerfuxUHATk2

    ReplyDelete
  37. https://giphy.com/gifs/justin-timberlake-feels-cry-me-a-river-EjzJxwcqpO2ly

    ReplyDelete
  38. https://media1.tenor.co/images/0094ec01de6b435a3b686a1568270c47/tenor.gif?c=VjFfZmFjZWJvb2tfd2ViY29tbWVudHM&itemid=14584980

    ReplyDelete
  39. https://giphy.com/gifs/wwe-popcorn-big-e-gif-3xkNUy3Vh8QbPmJZjK

    ReplyDelete
  40. Muskie,the narcissist, doesn’t like competition.

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  41. Marketing is not usually referred to as cheating. Lol. Musk sees that Twitter value dropping from its current roughly 9 billion all the way down to below a billion. Cannot wait to see Twitter become the new MySpace. #TwitterToZero

    ReplyDelete
  42. Just fight or whatever but don't harm my Instagram

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  43. I guess ppl love being ostriches with their heads in the sand

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  44. What a fu$%ing baby

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  45. Musk is a complete pos! Love how Zuck called musk out on his cheating affair! 🍿😂🤣

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  46. Zuck hired all the Twitter employees Musk fired

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  47. 44 billion spaffed up the wall, Elmo.

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  48. there is a clone of twitter for $200

    ReplyDelete
  49. How many bots have joined?

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  50. Its Not Joining if its annexed to your Facebook account automatically.

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  51. In two days they’ve gone from 0 followers to 70M followers. It must be the all-time record of any marketing effort achieved in less than 48 hours! As much as folks hate FB/Zuck, this speaks volumes about what people think about Twitter/Musk.

    ReplyDelete
  52. These 2 men are disgusting. I hope neither one runs for govt office.

    ReplyDelete
  53. Why threaten a lawsuit when you can stage a cagefight? If this makes their dispute more serious, they could add knives, tomahawks or perhaps chainsaws.

    ReplyDelete
  54. The Elon fans will probably claim Musk invented social media text. 🤣
    https://giphy.com/gifs/zuckerberg-testimony-1zKdb4WSHgY4QKAsjo

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Nobody can fully understand the meaning of love unless he owns a cat🐈🐈 or a dog🐩🐩. A dog can show you more honest affection with a flick of his tail than a man can gather through a lifetime of handshakes, do you agree with that, my friend? I hope you don't mind sending me friend requests? I have tried several times to send you a request but it's not going through. I will appreciate it if you just click on my profile and send me a request. Thanks and God bless you .

      Delete
  55. Oops Elon paid big bucks on a social app which promises big money. A clone could be better, not just a likeness.

    ReplyDelete
  56. Free market!!!LMAO!

    ReplyDelete
  57. I'm so excited. I can't believe it! Lincoln your work really worked! My ex- husband is back after he left me and the kids, he call me and apologize to me , wanting us to get back together again...and here we are! Yes, I'm extremely happy that we are living together again .
    👉Doctor Lincoln

    ReplyDelete
  58. Musk should just do a Facebook clone. Only people on this thread enjoy zucks censorship. most of us are not offended by a difference of opinion .

    ReplyDelete
  59. Elon is that guy in an online match who accuses you of hacking for beating him over and over.

    ReplyDelete
  60. These two douche canoes should fight in a cage match and settle their rich boy fued once and for all. The loser gets a ticket to Mars.

    ReplyDelete
  61. Sue the shyt out of Meta and son of a b**ch mark zuckerberg 😂😂😂

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  62. The fall of Elon Musk. 😁

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  63. Two of the biggest douchebags in history.

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  64. Elon is a loser. Don’t believe anything he says

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  65. All I see with Zuckerberg’s new “Threads” logo is 666.

    They make everything so obvious, I’m sure a handful of you are incapable of seeing this.

    ReplyDelete
  66. Both of them are very familiar with stealing ideals from others so no surprise this happens

    ReplyDelete
  67. No Elon...zuck just didnt fire 75% of HIS employees like you did.

    ReplyDelete
  68. Musk is a bigger moron than traitor trumf.

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  69. What's more funny is that it won't allow you to delete your Threads account.. policy terms

    ReplyDelete
  70. Elon Musk is showing the world he is idiot

    ReplyDelete
  71. Are You Feeling Let Down By Your Lover, Are You Disappointed In What He / She Is Doing. You Feel Brokenhearted Lonely Emotionally Disconnected. Frustrated Because Of A Break Up / Extramarital Affair, This is your Solution you can contact him and gain your relationship back.
    👉Doctor Lincoln

    ReplyDelete
  72. Funny how everyone is standing up for Fuckernerd.... Everyone knows that he's a thief seeing as he stole the idea for Facebook from those Harvard students.

    ReplyDelete
  73. The kid who sucks at COD

    “LAG SWITCH! THEY HAVE A LAG SWITCH! That’s why I’m 2-78”

    ReplyDelete
  74. #MAGAt Musk should stick with tech that doesn't involve “Social Skills”. 😂

    ReplyDelete
  75. Chekquickly Ltd Brief

    This is a private, global housing company that provides an online marketplace platform for hospitality services. The platform is available via its official web app chekquickly.com / web app. Registered members can make use of this platform for arranging and providing lodging for homestays or tourism experiences in every part of Nigeria and more other African countries are coming in too and the rest of the world

    ReplyDelete
  76. All other car manufacturers should sue Musk for stealing their idea.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. except he isn't, and he is actually giving them intellectual property to use on their own cars!

      Delete
  77. The onion said it better:

    https://www.theonion.com/elon-musk-sues-mark-zuckerberg...

    ReplyDelete
  78. A rectangle with rounded corners 🤷🏼‍♂️

    ReplyDelete
  79. Elon is such a snowflake

    ReplyDelete
  80. The market manipulator of all time crying cheating on someone else. Friggin' hilarious.

    ReplyDelete
  81. Hey why don’t they fight it out, in a cage??

    ReplyDelete
  82. Seems like Mark was smart by hiring the people Elon fired. That’s called business…

    ReplyDelete
  83. That’s none of our business. Let these morons fight each other off. Clearly thread is neat!

    ReplyDelete
  84. Musk fired all those engineers and coders without paying the severance they were due, which voided the non-compete agreements they were under. They had to find other jobs and Zuck was hiring...

    ReplyDelete
  85. Truth social copied Twitter almost exactly and not a peep out of Elon

    ReplyDelete
  86. Let him file. The case will be dismissed on summary judgment in three years. Meanwhile Twitter will file Chapter 11 as Twitter users abandon Musk’s sinking ship.

    ReplyDelete
  87. I'm now in a complicated relationship between Twitter and Thread.

    ReplyDelete
  88. What a big baby just like his daddy trump 😆

    ReplyDelete
  89. Looking forward to them settling this in the ring 🥊🥊

    ReplyDelete
  90. Elon Musk the man who steals other peoples ideas, let’s remember he wasn’t a founding designer of Tesla or the founding owner of the company 

    ReplyDelete
  91. Musky is very sour! 🤣🤣🤣

    ReplyDelete
  92. Cheating what? It’s not a video game, they aren’t married to each other…

    ReplyDelete
  93. I thought Zuckerberg was a stupid guy , but he is Genius

    ReplyDelete
  94. Capitalism will win.

    ReplyDelete
  95. https://giphy.com/gifs/wah-benjammins-MVniNe8UyCgQbp3lhi

    ReplyDelete
  96. Cheating how? Bet I could use the word Cis on threads….

    ReplyDelete
  97. Saw that train coming a mile away

    ReplyDelete
  98. Someone’s just butthurt. Lay off all those twitter employees and guess who scoops em up.

    ReplyDelete
  99. Yeah it’s stupid. They’re pretty much going to try to build your Facebook account into threads a.k.a. cheating.

    ReplyDelete
  100. If Elmo didn't want those workers going to other companies, maybe he shouldn't have fired them 🤷

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. didn’t fire them he gave them the option to actually work which none of them were doing when Dorsey owned it. Or leave and they chose to leave

      Delete
    2. Elmo's not going to sleep with you, I hope you realize. 😂

      Delete
    3. poor people simping for capitalists. It's blatantly obvious that they were doing work, otherwise Twitter wouldn't have gone from a stable platform to one with routine outages. But simp on I guess.

      Delete
    4. Also, the same people you and Elmo claimed weren't working at Twitter went to Meta and created a whole platform. Seems like they do, in fact, actually work.

      Delete
    5. https://www.outkick.com/mark-zuckerbergs-threads-app-is.../ so much for freedom of speech. I guess it only applies if you agree with Zuck

      Delete
    6. Dude — no, he definitely fired them. You should try reading things, you might learn something.
      https://www.bloomberg.com/.../musk-plans-to-eliminate...

      Delete
  101. Brb gonna make a million off selling merch of Can I sue Elon Musk next?

    ReplyDelete
  102. I joined just to taste Musk's tears

    ReplyDelete
  103. https://media.tenor.co/iz8Sj3IbgjkAAAAM/people-are-so-mean-online-wario.gif?c=VjFfZmFjZWJvb2s&t=AAX_7hH98O4KzanpfgIitw&itemid=21567516

    ReplyDelete
  104. Wise men said only fools rushed in. 😄😂

    ReplyDelete
  105. https://media1.tenor.co/images/b9ad10d719f337e9fe7cc8b9d1cd02df/tenor.gif?c=VjFfZmFjZWJvb2tfd2ViY29tbWVudHM&itemid=24234219

    ReplyDelete
  106. Elon getting threaded 🪡

    ReplyDelete
  107. Se picaaqa🔥🤑🤑

    ReplyDelete
  108. Musk freaking out already. Lol

    ReplyDelete
  109. Replies
    1. They are both big cry babies.

      Delete
    2. and one is back to sporting diapers again

      Delete
  110. Zucker is a vermin

    ReplyDelete
  111. Next time he won’t just fire engineers, he’ll kill them. It’s easy when you have no human emotions.

    ReplyDelete

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