Twitter has threatened to sue Meta over its new platform "Threads," according to a letter sent by Twitter's attorney Alex Spiro to Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, Meta's parent company.
Meta, which launched its platform "Threads" on Wednesday and has already attracted over 30 million subscribers, aims to compete with Twitter, owned by Elon Musk, by leveraging the millions of users on Instagram.
Twitter Accuses Meta of Hiring Former Employees for "Threads" and Stealing Trade Secrets
According to the news site Semaphore, Spiro accused Meta in his letter of hiring former Twitter employees "who still have and may use access to Twitter's highly confidential trade secrets and other confidential information."
Spiro wrote in the letter, "Twitter intends to vigorously enforce its intellectual property rights and demands that Meta take immediate steps to cease any use of Twitter's trade secrets or other highly confidential information."
Andy Stone, a spokesperson for Meta, said in a post on "Threads": "No one on our engineering team was a former employee of Twitter."
A former senior employee at Twitter also told Reuters that he was not aware of any former Twitter employees working at "Threads."
Meanwhile, Twitter owner Elon Musk responded to a tweet reporting the news, saying "Competition is good, but cheating isn't."
"Threads" UI Resembles Twitter
The user interface of "Threads" resembles that of the short-form social media platform Twitter. However, "Threads" does not support keyword search or direct messaging.
Intellectual property law experts have said that Twitter needs much more detail than what is contained in the letter to bring a trade secret theft lawsuit against Meta.
Simply hiring former Twitter employees (whether they were voluntarily departed or pushed out) and the fact that Facebook created a somewhat similar site are unlikely to support a trade secret lawsuit," said Mark Lemley, a law professor at Stanford University.