Elon Musk’s lawyer wrote a letter to Zuckerberg ‘Competition is good but cheating is not.’ – Musk. Twitter CEO Elon Musk has also broken his silence on the Thread app. His lawyer Alex Spiro has written to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg threatening to take him to court.
Twitter has threatened to sue Meta after the latter launched the Threads app attracting users. As par Twitter News, the micro-blogging platform is threatening to sue Meta over “systematic, willful and unlawful misappropriation” of Twitter’s trade secrets and IP, as well as scraping of Twitter’s data. The same has been communicated to Mark Zuckerberg by Elon Musk’s lawyer Alex Spiro. Reacting to the news, Elon Musk said, “Competition is fine, cheating is not”, hinting that a big legal battle is on the cards over Threads app.
Twitter claimed that Meta has violated Twitter’s “intellectual property rights”. Twitter Daily News tweeted the said letter in which Spiro said that Twitter “has serious concerns that Meta Platforms (Meta) has engaged in systematic, willful and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property”.
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Meanwhile, Twitter claimed in the cease-and-desist that Meta has poached dozens of former employees in the past year. Some of whom “had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information”. And “many” of whom have “improperly” kept Twitter documents or electronic devices.
Meta point of view
Social media sites lost favor among users and advertisers. Ever since Elon Musk bought the platform for $44 billion last year and proceeded to enforce mass layoffs, subscription service upsets, and diminishing moderation efforts. That’s made room for several rivals like Mastodon, Hive Social, and others to rise. But none have been sued. Then again, none of them represent as big a challenger as Threads. Which accumulated 30 millions of users in less than 24 hours of being live.
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone took the opportunity to respond in a Threads post. “No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing,” he said.
The letter further advises Meta not to scrape Twitter’s data. Which per Twitter’s Terms of Service is only permitted in accordance with the site’s robots.txt file. Specifically, the file, used to tell cooperative bots how to behave, forbids crawling Twitter followers or following data.