>Spiro accused Meta of hiring dozens of former Twitter employees who “had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information.”
So you fire 80% of your workforce claiming they're dead weight and completely unnecessary, while simultaneously suing their new employer because apparently they were vital cogs who somehow "continue to have access to trade secrets"? So vital you're refusing to pay out any of their severance packages. Only in Elon land.
The firing is irrelevant. Noncompetes are unenforceable. It would be the exact same outcome if all of them voluntarily decided to leave Twitter and join Meta the same day. You have to prove to a court that these employees had access to some proprietary Twitter IP which they took to Meta and used to build Threads, which is not happening.
My question is – what trade secrets does Twitter even have that Meta didn't already have the existing infrastructure for, or competency to build themselves (probably better)?
None. There is no trade secret in building something like Twitter. Anyone on this site can probably make a clone of it.
The real secrets are the massive money needed to promote the network and to pay for the infrastructure, the massive social reach to attract top posters, the massive networking effect needed to make it a must-have app.
People on HN in particular tend to oversimplify large projects. Trying to build and maintain an app the size of Twitter would be hard. Trying to tie it into a functional advertising network would be harder. HN just tends to be brightly cynical about complexity in general; in reality there would be very significant challenges (as Musk is discovering now).
But do I buy that specifically Facebook could do it? Yeah, obviously they could. It's not at all surprising that Facebook could quickly launch a Twitter clone. This isn't like the "metaverse", Facebook already runs social networks that are larger and more complicated than Twitter is, and Threads looks to be highly tied into their existing infrastructure.
I could not build a Twitter clone in my free time, but I also don't currently run Instagram.
My guess would be stuff like upcoming products, business connections, contract details, way of doing business etc.
However I doubt that Musk has any grounds for claiming that "the most useless employees" who weren't even treated with dignity upon firing them would have transferred those to Meta illegally.
IMHO this is just Musk freaking out that the next time Twitter doesn't work as expected or asks for money, people would have real alternative to move on.
They definitely have existing products, knowledge and competency for building a twitter clone that could be adapted for this purpose (instagram/facebook posts & comment systems).
Knowledge is not automatically a trade secret. Skills from one job can be freely applied to another. The onus is on Twitter to prove that the employees took something specific (copyrighted code, a patented algorithm implementation, some other asset or IP) which is the property of Twitter and used it to build Threads. The last high profile lawsuit of this nature was Google vs Uber for stolen self driving tech, which had all of this and more.
Sorry if I was not clear, I'm saying that without hiring any Twitter folks, the Instagram folks could easily create a Twitter clone. Instagram posts & comments could be adapted pretty easily.
The question is whether the Twitter employees actually brought and used trade secrets for this effort.
The thing is these employees could have come in and directly used all the "knowledge and competency" they learned at Twitter to build Threads and it would still be 100% legal. There is a very high bar to proving whether any of it is actually a trade secret.
There's zero "trade secrets" (everyone knows how twitter works) and no technical secrets necessary. Threads is just instagram. It works and looks the same way. Instagram is photos with text, Threads is text with photos. The latter is not exactly rocket science to build when you already have built the former at scale and ran it successfully for years. And that's the genius of it!
> because apparently they were vital cogs who somehow "continue to have access to trade secrets"
I don't think this is a sane take. Knowing trade secrets and being a "necessity" are not related. They were, and you are, and I am, replaceable. Our possible deep esoteric knowledge of secret sauce maybe makes the replacement more painful, but that's all. If you've ever been on the "not fired" side of a layoff, you'll understand how losing someone "vital" is almost always just a disruption, in reality. The group may even collapse, but if the work truly is non-optional, pressure will build, and it will be done. If there's any competence, nobody will miss that person in a short time, and that's a good thing, because key person risk is a bad thing.
> ....former Twitter employees....continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets.
I don't think I've ever seen anyone admit to major organizational failings like that. I haven't worked for a company in at least 15 years where every single bit of access I had wasn't revoked within minutes.
When I last changed jobs in 2021 I watched the Outlook app on my phone. My boss walked me out of the building at 1:00pm, took my keycard, and the app access was revoked at 1:07pm.
It's interesting to think if grift of book sales and random convention talks can equal the ~30 billion of material value wiped out by Twitter.
Somewhat reminds me of Andrew Wakefield who went from being a licensed research MD to a guest of honor for "Conspira-Sea", a novelty cruise. Just a complete loss of authenticity and meaningful career prospects.
It depends what you mean by “court costs”. There are fees to file the case, but for the most part the judges time is paid for by taxpayers.
The vast majority of the expense in a court case will be the lawyers on both sides. These are, by default, paid by each party. There are some specific cases where the loser has to pay the winning side’s lawyers, but it’s pretty rare.
> the arrival of Threads is definitely an existential threat for Twitter
I had a similar thought when I joined Threads last night and within 30 seconds saw the accounts of Adam Schefter, Adrian Wojnarowski, and Shams Charania all actively posting.
If you follow NFL and NBA news you'll know these names but for anybody that doesn't, these insider accounts are firmly at the center of the NFL and NBA breaking news universe and for going on a decade now Twitter was where you went to follow them.
What Threads has done is break that monopoly Twitter had on this sort of thing. It gives regular users a clean, familiar, functional, working UI with a simple onboard process and it gives high-profile accounts a stable platform, a verified badge, and a boatload of users.
Could Twitter survive if it was no longer the epicenter of North American sports discussion? Probably, but it would be a big loss and would signal to other communities on there that Twitter's expiration date is rapidly approaching.
And the reason they are all immediately on Threads is that they saw the existential threat to their careers when Twitter went private and restricted their accounts to viewing 600/6000 Tweets last week. It's clear that with the daily random rule changes and service interruptions Twitter isn't the reliable platform that they need, and Instagram has a great track record of it.
I think these big accounts were given access to Threads much before the rate limiting debacle. And that was great tactic by Threads IMO. Having a lot of "Verified" accounts engagement on the app on day 1 when rest of the world joined gave it instant credibility.
People noticed that Twitter was unavailable on the first day of NBA Free Agency. I bet that is typically one of the biggest days on Twitter in terms of activity
Quite hilarious to see both her and Musk lauding the great Twitter community and Musk tweeting memes about Threads copying Twitter when they themselves showed up at Twitter yesterday. Neither of them had anything to do with building the app and its community. Quite the opposite in fact.
They're corporate anodynes meant for a specific audience.
Her job is to be corporate and professional - she's there to get advertisers back onboard with Twitter. She's the grownup there to soothe their worries about the instability in the platform. Or she was, until Musk decided to randomly change the basic value proposition behind the site with no warning, undoing anything she'd already accomplished and making it plain that anything she promises can't be trusted because she's completely powerless figurehead.
For her sake, I hope she got her first year's salary up front.
She's been talking to advertisers, trying to convince them that Twitter is a good, stable place to work with and they can resume/expand their ad buys. I don't know that she's achieved anything specifically, but I do know that if she has, it's dead now.
Musk hired her to help improve revenue, and then basically made it impossible for her to ever achieve that goal.
Assumably some backchannel conversations with existing advertisers or advertisers she’d like to lure back, assuring them that Twitter is a stable platform and its users will be able to do things like, for example, see tweets, for the foreseeable future.
Right? Imagine selling ad impressions and suddenly the entire scenario changes with zero warning. No doubt executives are falling all over themselves to get in on that shit.
I don’t know her at all, but I know she’s someone who looked at Musk’s handling of Twitter over the past few months, his personal behavior, and the offer to work with/for him in this environment and said, “Yeah, this seems like a good idea.”
It's tough to tell people you welcome hate speech in a way that doesn't turn off advertisers. She definitely spent some serious effort on that Tweet. YOU can be real, but apparently SHE can't.
This is literally one of the worst moves Twitter could have made to combat Threads or any of their copies. They're literally giving more eyes and coverage to Threads and painting them as a real contender.
Musk can't stay out of the limelight, for better or worse, and in this case it is definitely for the worse. Threads would have had a tiny fraction of the hype it does had it not been for his antics these last few weeks.
Your last sentence makes me wonder when Meta decided on the launch date for Threads. Were they always planning to launch it early summer timeframe or they seized on the recent Zuck/Musk fight drama + twitter rate limiting to maximize eyeballs? Threads is far from feature complete.
Adam Mosseri said in an interview that he "was worried that our window would close, because timing is important" re: launching before they were EU compliant, so I'm certain their launch date was rushed
We can always rely on Elon Musk's Twitter to make the worst move.
Meanwhile (as the article says) Meta has confirmed no employee on the Threads team came from Twitter. So the letter is already shown to be completely without basis.
Threads is built on Instagram's code base, which is why you can't currently delete your account on one without deleting on both. So it'll be a tough fight for Elon to prove the code is stolen, since such a big chunk of it was already there for years.
Despite this bone-headed move by Twitter, my question is: does this pose anti-trust problems for Meta?
Meta having a monopoly on all forms of social media does seem pretty bad to me.
I guess “monopoly” has a specific definition, but by having Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and the new Twitter, one company will control the majority of normal peoples’ communication online.
There is an outstanding FTC lawsuit against FB (No I'm not going to call them Meta) which would undo the Instagram and What's App acquisitions. If that were to be successful (it was dismissed once) I suppose Instagram+Threads would be a separate company.
BUT ... the FTC recently lost a case that would have blocked FB from acquiring a VR company (Within) because "Meta could have chosen to try to compete. Instead, it chose to buy". That is, not building their own VR fitness division is anti-competitive. FTC chair Lisa Khan has a raging hard-on for Zuck but it would be hilarious if they also try to block FB for being competitive.
It seems like it should (imho), but according to current law I doubt it. We haven't really updated that for network effects. Unless they start abusing their monopoly in an anti-competitive way (eg requiring advertisers to not advertise on other social networks, just Meta) I think they're fine legally.
The bundling is enough, IMO. Meta's dominant position in social with FB/Insta/Whatsapp/etc. is indisputable, count the users, and leveraging those products (primarily IG accounts) is bundling and could be literally torn apart by the DOJ if only they had the balls they did two decades ago.
That's a good question, the answer to your question is "no".
However you can apply the exact same logic to Apple. Is Apple's App Store preventing users from just using an Android phone? Or just launching their own competitor to the iPhone? The answer to that question is also "no".
However, there is a lot of discussion around whether Apple is behaving in an anti-competitive way. Same with Google in the online advertising market. Given the other ant-trust discussions taking place, I don't think it's ridiculous to ask whether Meta controlling _all_ the platforms on which most communications happen is good for society.
it's a bit tougher to compare as IG/threads and Twitter are just websites and phone apps whereas iPhone is the phone and app store that gates access to native applications so it's a level deeper and can be seen more as a utility.
It was already about to happen, but, sadly, Elon's mom said "no" and vetoed the whole thing[0]. I doubt that she will change her mind on that anytime soon, unfortunately.
Seems wholly unnecessary. I imagine a majority of Twitter users also have an Instagram or Facebook account. Sure the social graph is not identical, but it's probably more than good enough. Especially since Threads only has an algorithmic feed and follows are less important to what you see.
You forgot about Friendster (2002), it came before MySpace (2003), had great momentum, failed to scale (slow as hell), turned down $30M from Google, and then fizzled out. It had most of the features of Facebook, but a number of years before Facebook was available to the general public.
In a similar vain is there any risk to Lemmy or Mastodon? Did any current or former Twitter or Reddit employees contribute to Lemmy, Mastodon or the other open source alternatives to Twitter and Reddit? If so would they be a target for big corporations like Twitter and Reddit to pursue?
The amount of "Twitter has no intellectual property I could build it in my bedroom" gaslighting going on in this discussion is unbelievable. Buried the needle.
At scale? Not in a few weeks, and not with all the features, but the core features don't seem like a stretch for a small team, without scale in a couple months.
Meta/Instagram luckily already have a large scale social network, tons of money, and tons of engineers and a codebase that deals in users and text and images already, so it's a pretty good head start.
I don't really understand what you're getting at here. I don't see how indexing is a "special sauce"; Facebook has a larger network size than Twitter does and as far as I can tell it indexes all of its posts. What major social sites other than Tumblr/Mastodon don't have functioning search?
How important is refined search to a social network with no legacy content to search through? Surely that's something they can put off for N months and just accept whatever caption and relevancy limitations Instagram search imposes?
not necessarily on day one.. this is why threads only have search for users at the moment..
that is what everyone is doing now.. search for the people they care to follow..
They can work a few more days on that and add it in a update down the line.. by the time thread has enough content that search is important you can bet that search will be there..
i like the theory that they lunched now, sooner then originally planned, to surf on the mess that twitter made on the last few days. This would explain why threads is so incomplete in some areas, but probably will match all twitter features soon enough..
So you fire 80% of your workforce claiming they're dead weight and completely unnecessary, while simultaneously suing their new employer because apparently they were vital cogs who somehow "continue to have access to trade secrets"? So vital you're refusing to pay out any of their severance packages. Only in Elon land.