Can Elon Musk’s Twitter Platform Show Evidence of Trade Secret Theft by Meta?

Twitter has accused Meta Platforms of stealing trade secrets to create its new microblogging site, potentially sparking a legal dispute between the two social media giants. However, experts believe that Twitter would face significant challenges if it decides to take legal action. In a letter sent on Wednesday, Twitter claimed that Meta utilized its trade secrets to develop Threads, its latest social media platform, and insisted that Meta cease using this information.

Twitter said Meta had hired dozens of former Twitter employees, many of whom “improperly retained” equipment and documents from the company, and said Meta “deliberately” assigned them to work on Threads. It was unclear whether lawsuits would be filed.

A Twitter spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Meta spokesman Andy Stone said in a Threads post Thursday that no one on the site’s design team is a former Twitter employee. Legal experts said that while many companies have accused competitors who hired former employees with a similar product of stealing trade secrets, the cases are difficult to prove.

To win, a company must show that its competitor took information that had financial value and that the company had taken “reasonable efforts” to keep secret, said Polk Wagner, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

But the question of what constitutes “reasonable effort” can be tricky, he said. “The courts are pretty clear that you can’t just wave their hands and say something is a trade secret. On the other hand, you don’t have to lock everything down so much that nobody can access the information,” Wagner said.

ASSIGNMENT OF SECRETS

Meta launched Threads on Wednesday in what may be the first real threat to Twitter, which has alienated many users and advertisers since billionaire Elon Musk bought the microblogging site last year.

Threads is a bit like Twitter, as well as many other social media sites that have popped up in recent months. Among other things, courts look at whether the company made it clear to employees that the information in question was a trade secret.

Sharon Sandeen, a professor at the Mitchell Hamline School of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota, said companies have lost trade secrets when they argued that employees were bound by broad contracts that designated all company information as confidential.

Courts have said that employees cannot know in such broad language what is confidential and what is not, he said. Companies often file trade secrets only to find their claims aren’t as strong as they thought, experts said.

Sandeen was referring to a high-profile legal battle between Alphabet’s Waymo self-driving vehicle unit and ride-hailing company Uber Technologies. The case began with allegations of thousands of stolen documents and ended with a dispute over a small handful, he said.

Uber settled the case on the eve of the trial for $245 million worth of its own shares. While lawsuits are rare in trade secrets, settlements are common, said Wagner. “The incentives to settle in such cases are particularly strong because no one wants secrets to be discussed more than necessary,” he said.