Twitter spooked by Threads, threatens to sue Meta for hiring employees after Musk fired everyone

ICYMI, Elon Musk spent $44 billion in 2022 to buy Twitter and fired most of the company. A lot has happened since then, to say the least. Now Twitter is threatening to sue Meta for supposedly hiring employees that Musk fired and building a competitive platform.

Semafor has the scoop on the letter accusing Meta is stealing Twitter’s idea:

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.”

“Twitter intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights, and demands that Meta take immediate steps to stop using any Twitter trade secrets or other highly confidential information,” Spiro wrote in a letter obtained exclusively by Semafor. 

The lawyer goes on to accuse Meta of giving jobs to people Twitter put out of work:

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.”

For its part, Meta is unofficially denying that any fired Twitter employees have worked on Threads:

A Meta source 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,” the source said.

It should be noted that Mastodon, BlueSky, Post, etc. never sparked threats of legal action even though they use the same microblogging interface.

9to5Mac’s Take

In reality, there have been a dozen Twitter alternatives that have popped up since the richest man in the world started running Twitter like he’s broke. Most notably, Mastodon has been a place of refuge for the tech community that used to live on Twitter – and that started long before Musk tried to sue his way out of his agreement to buy Twitter.

More recently, the garden of microblogging services has blossomed with platforms focused on news, crypto, and gossip. The only difference with Threads is that Facebook and Instagram are making no effort to pretend they aren’t offering an alternative to a group of users unhappy with Twitter.

And unless Musk personally funds a lawsuit against Meta, suing over Threads doesn’t seem like a wise use of whatever funds Twitter can find. Maybe Musk can kickstart litigation by only showing tweets to users who financially back the cost of the lawsuit.

At any rate, the cease-and-desist letter is the best evidence that Threads could be a real threat to Twitter. You don’t get spooked otherwise.