MEXICO CITY (apro).- Twitter, owned by billionaire Elon Musk, threatens to take legal action against Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta company after it launched the new social network Threads.
“Competition is fine, cheating is not,” Musk tweeted, sharing a note about the possible lawsuit.
The consortium that owns Facebook and WhatsApp launched Threads, an application linked to Instagram based on text and designed to compete with the microblogging network founded by Jack Dorsey, recently affected by Musk’s decisions such as limiting the number of tweets that users can see .
In just a few hours, Threads amassed more than 30 million accounts.
According to a note originally published by the Semafor portal, Twitter accuses Meta of poaching former employees to create an imitation application.
A lawyer for X Corp, the successor company to Twitter, Alex Spiro, sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg accusing the consortium of engaging in systematic, deliberate and illegal misappropriation of trade secrets and intellectual property. from Musk’s network.
“Twitter intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights and demands that Meta take immediate action to stop using any Twitter trade secrets or other highly confidential information,” Spiro wrote in the letter.
“Twitter reserves all rights, including, but not limited to, the right to seek civil remedies and injunctive relief without notice to prevent Meta from further withholding, disclosing, or using its intellectual property,” the attorney warned.
Spiro accused Meta of hiring dozens of former Twitter employees who had and continue to have access to Twitter trade secrets and other highly sensitive information.
“Over the past year, Meta has hired dozens of former Twitter employees. Twitter knows that these employees previously worked at Twitter; that these employees had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information; that these employees have ongoing obligations to Twitter; and that many of these employees have improperly withheld Twitter documents and electronic devices.
“With that knowledge, Meta deliberately assigned these employees to develop, in a matter of months, Meta’s Threads app with the specific intent that they use Twitter trade secrets and other intellectual property to expedite the development of Meta’s competing app. , in violation of state and federal laws, as well as those employees’ ongoing obligations to Twitter.”
When Elon Musk took control of Twitter in October 2022, he fired thousands of company workers around the world.
Semafor consulted Andy Stone, director of communications for Meta, who stated that Twitter’s accusations are baseless.
“No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee, that’s just not a problem,” Stone said, according to the portal.
In a tweet posted after the initial publication of this story on Thursday, Musk wrote that “competition is okay, cheating is not.”
