Threads, an Instagram app, is now officially out, and plenty of big name brands are already on it. Seemingly just as quickly, Twitter is threatening to sue the new app’s parent Meta over its existence. The bird app’s lawyer Alex Spiro sent a letter addressed to Mark Zuckerberg claiming that with the creation of the new social media platform, Meta is engaging in “systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation” of the bird app’s trade secrets and intellectual property.
The letter, obtained by Semafor, alleges that Meta had hired a number of former employees of the bird app who still have access to “Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information”. Once under the employment of the Facebook parent, they were allegedly assigned to the development of Threads, using the aforementioned trade secrets to accelerate development. With that, Twitter demands that Meta “take immediate steps to stop using” those trade secrets.
On one hand, it shouldn’t be too surprising if a number of former Twitter employees suddenly found themselves being hired by a competitor. After all, Elon Musk quite dramatically fired 75% of its workforce not too long after taking over. But on the other, we have Andy Stone, the communications director at Meta, posting on Threads claiming that “no one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee”.
It’s also interesting to see Twitter go specifically after Threads, and not the many other similar platforms like Mastodon or Bluesky. Admittedly, these have had to start building their number of users from scratch, while Threads can leverage the already massive Instagram user base to jump off of. This likely contributes to the platform now having over 30 million users. Meta also has a lot more money to throw at its, er, features that draw heavy inspiration from the competition. Think Stories and Reels, among others.
(Source: Semafor [1] [2], Andy Stone, Mark Zuckerberg)
