Can Musk sue Meta over Threads?

Elon Musk can certainly try to sue Meta, and that’s what he’s threatening to do this week. The new Twitter boss is upset over Meta’s launch of Threads, a rival social media platform that appears to mimic Twitter in many ways, promising the same type of social interactions but without all of the drama that comes with a Musk enterprise. But it also comes without the promise of being a true haven for free speech. One of Musk’s attorneys sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday accusing him of creating a Twitter “copycat” by hiring former Twitter employees who presumably would bring the company’s trade secrets with them. But Zuckerberg (who is reportedly preparing for a literal “cage match” against Musk) claims that the accusations are baseless. (AP)

Twitter has threatened legal action against Meta over its new, text-based app called Threads, according to a letter obtained by Semafor.

In a Wednesday letter addressed to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Alex Spiro, an attorney representing Twitter, accused Meta of unlawfully using Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property by hiring former Twitter employees to create a “copycat” app.

Since launching Threads Wednesday night, Meta’s new app has collected tens of millions of sign ups. The app, which was created by the company’s Instagram team, arrives at a time when many are looking for Twitter alternatives to escape Elon Musk’s raucous oversight of the platform since acquiring it last year for $44 billion.

The foundation of Musk’s allegations should be easy enough to either establish or disprove. He’s saying that Zuckerberg knowingly hired former Twitter employees to hijack Twitter’s code. Zuckerberg claims that no former Twitter coders have been hired. Employment records at both companies should be able to sort that out quickly. If there are no former Twitter workers at Threads, Musk’s case evaporates.

But even if there are, that doesn’t signal any sort of automatic victory for Elon Musk. People change jobs all of the time, and their former work experience is almost always a significant factor in hiring decisions made by employers. People with direct experience in developing and maintaining a social media app would start with a leg up. But unless they literally smuggled copies of Twitter’s code out of the office and pasted it into Threads, it would be challenging to make a case against them.

Thus far, Threads has signed up tens of millions of users. I’m not one of them, at least not yet. I tried to explain my reasoning on Twitter yesterday.

No, I’m not signing up for a Threads account. (Yet) I’m still hoping that @ElonMusk will reconsider and fix this, particularly @Tweetdeck which is sort of working again, but so much less useful or user friendly.

— Jazz Shaw (@JazzShaw) July 6, 2023

I was an early supporter of Elon Musk taking over Twitter based on his promise to make it a true haven for free speech. To a certain extent he has done that, but we have also seen instances where he has begun suppressing tweets that don’t contain overt threats of violence. It would appear that Twitter is still open to squashing speech, but now it tends to be speech that is critical of Twitter or Elon Musk himself.

We have also repeatedly seen reports that Musk is suppressing or shadowbanning accounts that fail to pay for his monthly “blue check” program. There seems to be some merit to that accusation, though it’s difficult for rank-and-file users to discern. To be sure, I remain a capitalist and I’m not going to fault Musk for wanting to make his recent acquisition profitable, but this is a very different business model than the old “free for all” Twitter we grew used to over more than a decade.

All in all, I would agree that Musk’s tenure as the owner of Twitter has been chaotic and his adherence to his own rules has been inconsistent. After 14 years and more than 200,000 tweets, I haven’t left the platform yet. But I do notice that I’m using it a lot less since the most recent changes. And that’s because Twitter – and Tweetdeck in particular – is a lot less useful than it used to be. Elon Musk rode to the rescue when the platform’s previous proprietors were squelching free speech left and right. (Well… mostly “right” in terms of political leanings.) But it’s beginning to seem as if we’ve simply traded one tyrant for another.