Twitter accuses Meta of hiring former staff in cease-and-desist letter

assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 571 points –
Twitter accuses Meta of hiring former staff in cease-and-desist letter
businessinsider.com

There's just something fucking hilarious about laying off employees, mocking them, and being sued for improperly firing them -- and then whining that your competitor hired them and that they have access to Twitter information still.

I believe this fits well under the "fuck around and find out" doctrine.

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The simple fact that they are former employees is meaningless. This is especially true in California (i.e. where Twitter HQ is, and presumably most of these employees) where non-competes are nearly completely unenforceable. Twitter will have to specifically show that it's about their internal trade secrets, and not just the general experience they brought from their time at Twitter.

But right now, it's entirely Twitter doing the talking. We haven't seen yet how Meta will respond. I predict there is a 0% chance that Threads gets shutdown any time soon.

If you read the actual letter, it seems to paint a slightly different picture. They vaguely order Meta to stop using twitters trade secrets (whatever that may be), and serve notice to preserve communications. That's fairly normal. But then they have an entire tangent about scraping Twitter's publicly available data.

I believe Meta commented that they had no former Twitter engineers on the Threads team

Thank you, I hadn't seen that yet. Assuming it's true, that's going to make their claims very hard to prove. It might even get dismissed.