Twitter threatens Meta with lawsuit over threads
Trade secrets are said to have taken former Twitter employees to Meta, Twitter's lawyer is angry. He threatens Meta with a lawsuit.
Meta's Threads app harvests an exceptional amount of data from its users. That would not be allowed in the EU.
(Image: blackzheep/Shutterstock.com)
07/06/2023 10:58 p.m
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The market launch of Twitter competitor Threads from Meta Platforms has upset Twitter. Twitter quickly threatened a lawsuit in a letter to Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg and demanded that evidence be secured. The accusation: Meta "systematically, intentionally and unlawfully appropriated trade secrets and other intellectual property of Twitter" for the development of the new Instagram service threads. The demand: stop it, otherwise we will sue you!
Meta reportedly hired dozens of former Twitter employees. So far so obvious: Since Elon Musk had to take over Twitter , he has fired about 80 percent of the former workforce ("Tweeps"). Of course they are looking for new jobs. Now, Twitter Meta alleges that it knows the newly hired ex-tweeters continue to have access to trade secrets and other "top secret information," that they remain subject to contractual obligations to Twitter, and that many "properly used Twitter's documents and electronic devices." would have kept
Knowing this, it is alleged, Meta commissioned these people to set up the Twitter copy threads - with the specific intention that they use Twitter's trade secrets and other intellectual property rights. This is a violation of US law, state law and the contractual obligations of former Twitter employees.
Unclear basis for allegations
According to the letter, the basis for these serious allegations are "recent reports", which the letter does not describe in more detail. Heise online has asked Meta for a statement. An unnamed meta insider fundamentally denies the allegations. "Nobody on the Threads programming team is a former Twitter employee," the source told news website Semafor.
Threads is a new area in Meta's Instagram that is significantly less photo-heavy. Instagram users outside of the European Union can use Threads without further registration and automatically delight their previous Instagram followers with their short Threads postings. The product is not yet fully developed, numerous functions are still missing, including the planned interconnection with the open Fediverse, which also includes Mastodon.
Twitter on a shrinking course
Twitter, on the other hand, is going in the other direction and isolating itself more and more. Access to Twitter's automatic programming interfaces (API) has made Musk so expensive that usage has plummeted and popular third-party apps have shut down. Even the number of tweets that Twitter users can read per day is now limited, while users without a Twitter account can see practically nothing.
In this sense, Twitter's threatening letter reminds Zuckerberg that Meta is not allowed to crawl or scrape on Twitter. The automatic reading of Twitter's websites, SMS, API, e-mail messages, applications, buttons, widgets, advertisements and commercial services is expressly prohibited. In the final paragraph, the attorney requests that Meta keep all records that may be relevant to the litigation, from job postings to communicating with the former tweeps to programming threads.
There is harsh criticism of the extensive data that threads collects from its users. Because that would be illegal in the EU, Threads is not on the market here. If you really want to, you can also install Threads on an iPhone in Germany .
( ds )
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