Tech
Twitter sues Threads: Twitter and Meta engage in plagiarism allegations
In less than 3 days since its launch, Instagram Threads is arriving shrouded in controversy and Elon Musk is already preparing to sue Meta.
Instagram Threads is now official. And the truth is that Meta’s new social media, which wants to compete with Elon Musk’s platform, has some similarities to Twitter, to the point that Elon Musk is considering suing Instagram Threads for plagiarism.
Alex Spiro, Twitter’s lawyer, reportedly sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg arguing that they used Twitter’s trade secrets and intellectual property to create Instagram Threads.
This isn’t the first time Twitter has pulled out the lawsuit gun. It recently accused Microsoft of using its API without permission. And now it seems that Elon Musk is very angry about the arrival of his new rival, so he is bringing out his arsenal of legal weapons to intimidate them.
Twitter accuses Instagram Threads of plagiarism
According to Spiro, who is also Elon Musk’s personal lawyer, Meta hired dozens of former Twitter employees to create Instagram Threads. And given the massive layoffs, it makes perfect sense that Meta would want to fish in troubled waters and poach top talent from its archrival. Even more so for a platform like Threads, where Twitter’s talent for making everything work perfectly is pure gold. But have they really plagiarized the little blue bird’s social media?
The problem is that, according to Twitter’s letter to Mark Zuckerberg, which you can see above these lines, many of these former employees had access to Twitter’s trade secrets and used them to create an app that is a clone of the social network, which he accuses them of violating state and federal laws.
So Twitter is threatening legal action against Instagram Threads and demanding that Meta take immediate action to stop using Twitter trade secrets. And yes, Meta has responded in a Threads post, where communications director Andy Stone wrote that “no one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing.”
It seems that Meta is not too worried about the possible lawsuit from Twitter, although we will have to follow this soap opera closely, because it seems that Elon Musk is not going to sit idly by.