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July 6 (UPI) — In a preemptive move, Elon Musk’s Twitter has issued a cease-and-desist letter to Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, ahead of a potential lawsuit related to the release of Instagram’s groundbreaking Threads application.
Threads, a microblogging platform similar to Twitter, was launched on Wednesday and rapidly attracted over 30 million registered users within 24 hours. This surge in popularity might be attributed to frustrations with Musk’s decision-making process and controversial tweets.
“Twitter is deeply concerned that Meta Platforms has deliberately and unlawfully misused Twitter’s trade secrets and other valuable intellectual property,” claimed Alex Spiro, Musk’s attorney in the letter obtained by Dexerto.
The specific copyrighted material Twitter alleges Meta has used remains unclear. However, Spiro contends that Meta has hired numerous former Twitter employees following Musk’s significant reduction in staff last year. When approached by UPI for a comment, Twitter responded with a poop emoji.
Andy Stone, Meta’s communications director, contradicted Spiro’s claims, stating that no ex-Twitter employees are part of the Threads engineering team. Stone made this response in a statement on Threads, emphasizing that such claims are baseless.
Notwithstanding Stone’s statement, Spiro maintains that Meta employees have “improperly retained” Twitter documents and swiftly created a “copycat” version of the social network within a few months.
“Twitter intends to vigorously protect its intellectual property rights,” Spiro asserted.
Meta has been instructed to preserve any documents relevant to the dispute with Twitter, in anticipation of a potential lawsuit.
Threads was launched shortly after Musk announced temporary limitations on the number of tweets accounts can read. These restrictions were instituted to address the issues of excessive data scraping and system manipulation, which Spiro accused Meta of engaging in with his letter.
Verified Twitter accounts are now limited to reading 6,000 posts per day, while unverified accounts can read up to 600 posts per day. Furthermore, newly created unverified accounts will be restricted to reading 300 posts per day. Musk later adjusted these limitations, increasing the limits to 8,000 posts per day for verified users, 800 posts per day for unverified users, and maintaining 400 posts per day for new unverified accounts. The duration of these limitations remains unspecified.
