Twitter threatens to sue Meta over Threads. Threads, Meta’s app designed to compete with struggling Twitter, has run into legal trouble just hours after its launch.
While the app has gained over 30 million users since its launch on Thursday, its competitor has threatened to sue, claiming that Threads infringes on Twitter’s “intellectual property rights.”
Elon Musk’s lawyer Alex Spiro has written to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, accusing him of “unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property”. The letter was first published by the news outlet Semafor.
The letter 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.”
“Twitter intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights and demands that Meta take immediate steps to stop using any Twitter trade secrets or other highly confidential information,” Alex Spiro wrote in the letter.
Elon Musk, in response to a tweet citing the news said, “Competition is fine, cheating is not.”
As Twitter threatens to sue Meta over Threads, Meta claimed that no one in the engineering team at Threads is a former Twitter employee.
“No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee – that’s just not a thing,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a Threads post.
Threads is the most serious challenger to Musk’s Twitter, which has seen a slew of potential competitors emerge but has yet to replace one of the world’s largest social media platforms, despite its difficulties.
Also read: Meta launches Threads against Twitter, how to use it
Threads allow users to post text and links, as well as reply to or repost messages from others, similar to Twitter.
Instagram and Facebook, both owned by Meta, have a long and successful history of cloning products from new internet competitors. The company’s Reels feature was a rip-off of TikTok’s viral video app, and its Stories disappearing posts mirrored Snapchat’s rise.
