Twitter has threatened to sue Meta for infringing on Twitter’s “intellectual property rights” with its new Threads app, which Mark Zuckerberg has openly referred to as a competitor.
A lawyer for Twitter stated in a letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, which was originally published by the news outlet Semafor, that the firm “has serious concerns that Meta Platforms has engaged in systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property.”
“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,” wrote Alex Spiro in the letter.
Threads, a text-based chat software aimed at competing with Twitter, was released on Wednesday to generally positive reviews. Threads received 30 million sign-ups in less than 24 hours, according to the business.
Threads accounts are linked to Instagram profiles, making the signup process smooth between apps and providing the Twitter clone with an existing user base. According to Zuckerberg, it is Meta’s attempt to build a “public conversations app with 1 billion+ people,” an opportunity that Twitter “hasn’t nailed.”
Twitter alleges in the cease-and-desist letter that Meta has recruited dozens of former workers in the last year, some of whom “had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information” and “many” of whom have since left the company.
“With that knowledge, Meta deliberately assigned these employees to develop, in a matter of months, Meta’s copycat ‘Threads’ app with the specific intent that they use Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property in order to accelerate the development of Meta’s competing app, in violation of both state and federal law as well as those employees’ ongoing obligations to Twitter,” according to the letter.
In response to the letter, Meta’s communications director, Andy Stone, stated on Threads that the staff that used to work at Twitter does not include any engineers.
