By sending a letter to Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter threatened to sue Meta in connection with the new social network Threads, writes Reuters.
Meta launched its new social network Threads on Wednesday, the 5th of July, and has already reached more than 30 million users, and the platform seems to set to overtake Twitter as it taps directly into Instagram’s billions of users.
Twitter attorney Alex Spiro has accused Matt of hiring high-level Twitter employees who had and still have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other confidential information. In the letter sent to Meta, the lawyer wrote that Twitter requires Meta to immediately take the necessary steps to stop using Twitter’s trade secrets and other confidential information.
A Reuters source with access to information about the content of the letter confirmed it on the 6th of July, while Spiro has not responded to a request to comment on the letter.
Meta’s Andy Stone said in a post published by Threads:
“No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing.”
Meanwhile, Twitter owner Elon Musk has said that competition is acceptable, but cheating is not.
Since Musk took over Twitter last October, the platform has seen a host of potential competitors, including Mastodon and Bluesky. Only the interface of Threads is very similar to Twitter, however,
there is no keyword search or private messaging in Threads.
Intellectual property rights experts, including Stanford University professor Mark Lemley, say the information in the letter is not enough to start a lawsuit. Lemley said that Meta’s hiring of ex-employees of Twitter and the fact that Facebook created a similar app alone is not enough to make a case.
New York University professor Jeanne Fromer said that in order to accuse another company of stealing intellectual property, it is also necessary to prove that it has taken sufficient steps to protect its own property.
Twitter’s latest challenges follow a series of chaotic decisions that have caused both users and advertisers to turn away. Musk’s last controversial decision was to limit the number of posts that can be read in one day.
Read also: Meta creates an app that will compete with Twitter