Threads: Twitter threatens to sue Meta for plagiarism – 7/6/2023 – Tech

Twitter notified Meta out of court with allegations of breach of trade secrets in the development of Threads, Instagram’s new social network. The document, obtained by the Semaphor website, includes a threat of civil proceedings, with injunctive relief, to prevent damage.

The lawyer who signs the letter, Alex Spiro, claims that Meta hired dozens of former Twitter employees with access to documents and electronic devices from the social network to develop a copy: Threads. The text does not mention names.

A person linked to Meta told Semafor that Twitter’s accusations are groundless. No one on the engineering team behind Threads would have come from Elon Musk’s social network, according to this interlocutor.

wanted by Sheet, Meta did not comment until the publication of this report. Twitter responded to the report’s request for information with a feces emoji — the automatic response has been sent since March for requests related to reports.

According to the Twitter notification, the former employees had and continue to have access to the social network’s trade secrets. They also had ongoing commitments to the company.

Twitter has laid off about 4,000 employees since Musk bought the platform in October.

Twitter’s lawyer, Spiro, alleges that Meta was aware of the situation and intentionally hired these people to develop a social network similar to Twitter. Such a move would violate US federal and state law, says the representative.

The document sent to Meta also asks that Mark Zuckerberg’s holding company not download information from Twitter users and pages without authorization.

In less than 24 hours on the air, Threads already has more than 30 million users, according to Mark Zuckerberg’s publication on the social network itself. Submissions are driven by an integration with Instagram, which has more than 2 billion active accounts.

About 300 million people are on Twitter, according to estimates. It’s impossible to check that number since Musk bought the platform and took it off the Stock Exchange.

The social network Bluesky, developed by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, has 50,000 users but accepts subscriptions by invitation only. The Mastodon, 13 million.

The document was interpreted by the international press as an attempt by Musk to slow the progress of Threads.

The new Instagram social network came online, with Twitter in crisis, after the purchase by Elon Musk in October last year. The first news about Threads appeared in the specialist Platformer newsletter in March.

Criticism of Twitter intensified after Elon Musk announced a daily limit on publication views.

The social network limited, on Saturday (1st), the daily viewing of tweets to just 600 per user. On Sunday (2), it increased the limit to one thousand. The measure aims to limit the access of artificial intelligence companies to Twitter content.