The founders of the social media app Lasso are suing Facebook for allegedly stealing their name. Facebook launched a clone of the wildly popular video-sharing app TikTok and named it Lasso after accepting advertising from the original Lasso, according to Daily Beast.

In 2017, Blair Sargent launched a social media app Lasso, partnering with local businesses to encourage people to meet up in person while earning perks like free drinks. In 2018, the company began to concentrate on local college markets in the Twin Cities, advertising on Facebook and Instagram ads. Then Facebook launched its own app by the same name. New users kept downloading Sargent’s app then quickly deleted it.

His app’s retention numbers went down, ad costs went up, and with more than $12,000 invested in Facebook ads for his project, “We fell down the app store search rankings and ultimately our marketing costs increased significantly,” Sargent told The Daily Beast. 

In a trademark lawsuit filed last week, Sargent and his co-founder claim Facebook was aware of the existing Lasso app “more than a full year after Lasso began using its mark in commerce and after Lasso had paid Facebook to advertise the same mark,” Sargent told the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

“I want Facebook to stop using the name,” Sargent said. 

Facebook’s Lasso app is considered a clone of TikTok, the short-form video sharing app.

Historically, many of Facebook’s popular social features were conceived to copy competitors, most notably Facebook’s 2016 launch of Instagram Stories which cloned the main feature of Snapchat—then regarded as an existential threat to Facebook’s business.

Daily Beast

Forging ahead and beating the competition at any cost is the kind of big tech behavior Sen. Elizabeth Warren has called anti-competitive. “They’ve bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, and tilted the playing field against everyone else,” Warren wrote in her proposal to break up big tech. “And in the process, they have hurt small businesses and stifled innovation.”

TikTok is so popular that it was the third most downloaded app worldwide in the first quarter, ahead of Facebook and Instagram, and just behind WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, according to app analytics firm Sensor Tower.

Listen to GHOGH with Jamarlin Martin | Episode 51: Bärí A. Williams

Part 2. Jamarlin talks to tech attorney and diversity strategist Bärí Williams about the growing gap in big tech regulations between the U.S. and E.U., and why Democrats have been slow in bangin’ against Silicon Valley greed compared to Wall Street greed in 2008. They also discuss reparations and artificial intelligence being weaponized against Black people.

It’s owned by ByteDance, a Chinese tech conglomerate founded in 2012 by former Microsoft engineer Zhang Yiming, Fortune reported. 

Facebook’s Lasso never caught on, according to The Motley Fool. “Facebook will likely kill off Lasso, but it will still probably launch more TikTok clones — just as it repeatedly launched Snapchat clones (like Poke, Slingshot, Lifestage, and Flash) before it settled on using Instagram as its main Snapchat competitor.”

Sargent said he didn’t want to file a lawsuit. “We weren’t left with much choice.”