Elon Musk dropped a line: “Competition is fine, cheating is not”. Yes, Twitter is going after Meta (Facebook parent company), alleging ‘”systematic, willful and unlawful misappropriation” of Twitter’s trade secrets and IP, as well as scraping of Twitter’s data…’ for creating its Twitter cline, Threads.
While Threads has made a serious splash, notching 30 million downloads in less than 24 hours, it may also be facing legal trouble from rival Twitter. The new Meta app is viewed as “the most serious threat yet to Elon Musk’s struggling social media site,” according to Bloomberg. And Twitter is already threatening to sue Meta, alleging in a lawyer’s letter that the app is a “copycat” of its platform and that Meta hired its former employees to work on the project, stealing trade secrets to launch it. Meta denied the allegation. Threads, which has been in development since January, works through Instagram, allowing users to maintain the same username and import accounts they already follow onto the platform. Bill Gates, Ellen DeGeneres and Oprah Winfrey are among its most high-profile early adopters. (LinkedIn News)
Good People, this play will not end in a draw which means someone will win. Except the “scrapping of data” which if proven could be a problem for Meta, I do not think just cloning Twitter will get regulators and courts on the side of Twitter.
Yes, in this age, everyone does everything, and the industrial age mantra of core competency has since faded to a large extent. I think Meta’s Threads has many grounds (excluding the data scraping accusation) to continue to thread!
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Why? I am not sure many courts will care because another person cloned another social media platform. Meta has a great history of that, cloning SnapChat (via Instagram Stories) and TikTok (via Reels) even as YouTube got its version of TikTok (via Shorts). So, this is an industry practice and they rarely sue one another!
Advantage: Threads.
NEWS: Twitter 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, in a cease-and-desist letter sent yesterday to Zuckerberg by Elon's lawyer Alex Spiro. pic.twitter.com/enWhnlYcAt
— X News Daily (@xDaily) July 6, 2023
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