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In a recent social media post, Elon Musk, the executive chairman of Twitter, accused Meta, the parent company of Facebook, of “cheating” in relation to the release of Threads, a text-based social network resembling Twitter.
While Musk expressed his support for healthy competition, he made it clear that he would not tolerate unfair practices. This statement follows a letter sent by Twitter’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, to Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, in which legal action was threatened.
Spiro’s letter, dated July 5, stated that Twitter intends to rigorously protect its intellectual property rights and demanded that Meta immediately cease using Twitter’s trade secrets. The letter claimed that Meta had hired former Twitter employees who had access to confidential information, including trade secrets, and had assigned them to develop a “copycat” application called Threads. The allegations suggest that Meta used Twitter’s trade secrets and intellectual property to expedite the development of their competing app.
The letter also served as a formal notice to Meta to preserve any documents relevant to the dispute between Twitter and Meta, as well as any former Twitter employees currently employed by Meta.
Spiro emphasized that Meta is prohibited from engaging in crawling or scraping of Twitter’s followers or following data without prior consent from Twitter.
On July 5, Meta launched Threads, its new text-based social network, in 100 countries. The release of Threads came shortly after Twitter faced criticism for temporarily limiting the number of posts users could read, known as the rate limit debacle.
The conflict between Twitter and Meta highlights the intense competition in the social media landscape and the importance of protecting intellectual property rights in the digital sphere.
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