Twitter has threatened to sue Meta over its new Threads app, which Mark Zuckerberg has openly touted as a rival, claiming the company has violated Twitter’s intellectual property rights.
In a letter to CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, a lawyer for Twitter said the company “has serious concerns that Meta Platforms, Meta, 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”, Alex Spiro wrote in the letter.
Credible news disclosed that Meta launched Threads, a text-based conversation app intended to rival Twitter, on Wednesday to a largely positive reception. The company said Threads garnered 30m sign-ups in less than 24 hours after launching, apparently making it the most rapidly downloaded app ever. Threads accounts are linked to Instagram profiles, making the process to sign up seamless between apps and giving the Twitter copycat a built-in user base.
Twitter claims in the cease-and-desist that Meta has poached dozens of former employees in the past year, some of whom had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets as well as other highly confidential information and many of whom have improperly kept Twitter documents or electronic devices.
“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”, the letter reads.
In response to the letter, Meta’s communications director, Andy Stone, posted on Threads that there are no engineers on the team that used to work at Twitter.
It’s unclear what evidence Twitter has that former employees who now work at Meta continue to have access to Twitter intellectual property or trade secrets. Twitter responded to a request for comment with an automated email of a poop emoji.
Meanwhile, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has joined the new text-based app, Threads.
In his first post on Threads, President Tinubu wrote: “My fellow Tailors, Idan has landed”.
