Twitter Threatens To Sue Meta’s Threads

The launch of Meta’s Threads, akin to Twitter, has kicked up a row between the parent organisations. Twitter threatened to sue Meta Platforms over the launch of Threads platform. A letter to this effect was sent to Facebook parent’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg by Twitter’s advocate Alex Spiro.

Launched on Wednesday, Threads logged more than 30 million sign ups and is hopeful that it can take on Elon Musk’s Twitter by leveraging billions of users on Instagram.

Twitter’s Spiro, in his letter, accused Meta of hiring former Twitter employees who ‘had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information,” according to a report on news website Semafor.

“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,” Spiro wrote in the letter.

A source from Reuters having knowledge of the letter confirmed its contents on Thursday. However, Spiro did not respond to a Reuters request for comment.

Meanwhile, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a Threads post: “No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing,”

A former senior Twitter employee told Reuters they were not aware of any former staffers working on Threads, nor any senior personnel who landed at Meta at all.

Twitter owner Musk said, “Competition is fine, cheating is not,” in response to a tweet citing the news.

Meta owns Instagram as well as Facebook. Since Musk’s takeover of the micro-blogging platform last October, Twitter has received competition from Mastodon and Bluesky among others.