Twitter’s new rival, Meta’s Threads app, gained over 30 million users within 18 hours of its launch, posing a significant challenge to Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter, new reports have stated.
According to Al Jazeera, “Twitter has responded by threatening to take legal action against Meta, the parent company of Facebook, according to a letter sent by Twitter’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, to Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Mark Zuckerberg.”
Meta launched Threads earlier this week, intending to compete with Elon Musk’s Twitter by leveraging Instagram’s vast user base.
However, Twitter has raised serious concerns about Meta’s actions, alleging that the company has engaged in deliberate and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and intellectual property.
In the letter, Mr Spiro emphasized Twitter’s intent to enforce its intellectual property rights and demanded that Meta immediately cease the use of any Twitter trade secrets or confidential information.
According to the Semafor report published on Thursday, Mr Spiro accused Meta of hiring former Twitter employees, “Who had access to Twitter’s trade secrets and highly confidential information.”
However, Meta spokesperson, Andy Stone denied this claim, stating in a Threads post that none of the Threads engineering team members were former Twitter employees.
A former senior Twitter employee confirmed to Reuters that they were not aware of any former colleagues working on Threads or any senior personnel joining Meta.
In response to the news, Twitter owner Elon Musk commented, “Competition is fine, cheating is not,” in a tweet mentioning the issue.
Since Musk acquired Twitter in October 2022, the platform has faced competition from other platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky. Notably, the user interface of Threads bears a striking resemblance to Twitter’s microblogging platform.