Meta, which launched vestments on Wednesday and has logged further than 30 million signups, looks to take on Elon Musk’s Twitter by using Instagram’s billions of users. Spiro, in his letter, indicted Meta of hiring former Twitter workers who” had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other largely nonpublic information,” News website Semafor first reported. “
Twitter intends to rigorously apply its intellectual property rights, and demands that Meta take immediate way to stop using any Twitter trade secrets or other largely nonpublic information,” Spiro wrote in the letter. A Reuters source with knowledge of the letter verified its contents on Thursday.
Spiro didn’t respond to a Reuters request for comment. “No one on the Threads engineering platoon is a former Twitter hand — that is just not a thing,” Meta prophet Andy Stone said in a Thread posts. A former elderly Twitter hand told Reuters they weren’t apprehensive of any former staffers working on Threads, nor any elderly labor force who landed at Meta at all. Meanwhile, Twitter proprietor Musk said,” Competition is fine, cheating is not,” in response to a tweet citing the news.
Meta owns Instagram as well as Facebook. Since Musk’s preemption of the social media platform last October, Twitter has entered competition from Mastodon and Bluesky among others. Threads’ user interface, still, resembles the microblogging platform. Still, Threads doesn’t support keyword quests or direct dispatches.
To press a trade secret theft claim against Meta, Twitter would need much further detail than what’s in the letter, said intellectual property law experts including Stanford law professor Mark Lemley.
“The bare hiring of former Twitter workers (who Twitter itself laid off or drove down) and the fact that Facebook created a kindly analogous point is doubtful to support a trade secrets claim,” he said. Jeanne Fromer, a professor at New York University, said companies professing trade secret theft must show they made reasonable sweats to cover their commercial secrets. Cases frequently revolve around secure systems that were circumvented in some way.
The newest challenge to follows a series of chaotic opinions that have alienated both users and advertisers, including Musk’s rearmost move to limit the number of tweets users can read per day. Reporting by Akash Sriram, Tiyashi Datta in Bengaluru, and by Jody Godoy and Katie Paul in New York; Editing by Shailesh Kuber and Josie Kao