Twitter Is Threatening to Sue Meta Over Threads, Meta Executives Threaten to Piss Their Pants Laughing

Max Tani, reporting for Semafor:

On Wednesday, Instagram parent company Meta introduced Threads, a text-based companion to Instagram that resembles Twitter and other text-based social platforms. Just hours later, a lawyer for Twitter, Alex Spiro, sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg accusing the company of engaging in “systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property.”

Good luck with that.

Spiro accused Meta of hiring dozens of former Twitter employees who “had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information.”

He also alleged that Meta assigned those employees to develop “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 law as well as those employees’ ongoing obligations to Twitter.”

It’s comical to think that Meta needed engineers from Twitter to build Threads. Like Twitter is a model of reliability and stability, and Meta’s platforms don’t serve an entire order of magnitude more users. Even more comical:

Andy Stone, Meta’s communications director, told Semafor that Twitter’s accusations are baseless. “No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing,” he said.

Even if ex-Twitter employees were working on Threads, Elon Musk fired them. It’s not illegal to hire people fired by a competitor. Would be kind of wacky if it were. This letter is so transparent: Musk is threatened by Threads and jealous of the mountain of media attention it’s getting, so he’s lashing out. Commanding his lawyer to send a silly letter like this feels like a Trump move, no exaggeration.

★ Thursday, 6 July 2023