The fact that Threads, Meta’s Twitter competitor, already has more than 30 million registered users, makes Elon Musk clearly nervous. One of his lawyers has sent a letter to Mark Zuckerberg threatening to go to court.
The run-up to Threads’ launch has already seen witty tweets and a potential cage fight, but it could now come to a head-to-head clash. The American news site ‘Semafor’ published a letter from Alex Spiro, a lawyer for Musk, on Thursday evening.
“Twitter is deeply concerned that Meta has systematically, knowingly and unlawfully misused Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property,” it read. The lawyer also accuses Zuckerberg’s technology company of hiring dozens of former Twitter employees.
According to the lawyer, they would still have access to internal information from Twitter, ranging from documents and electronic devices. They were then employed to work on Threads and use that knowledge to accelerate the development of the app, according to the Twitter attorney.
The lawyer threatens to go to court to defend Twitter’s intellectual property. He also accuses Meta of stealing data from Twitter, against the rules of the platform. This so-called ‘scraping’ is one of the reasons why users have recently been able to read only a limited number of tweets.
“None of the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee,” a Meta source told Semafor. Our editors have asked Meta’s spokesperson for a response. As soon as it is available, it will be added to this article.
LOOK. Whether it will ever actually come to a cage fight between Zuckerberg and Musk is not clear, but the Meta boss is already prepared
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