A day after Facebook parent company Meta went live with its Twitter-like social media app Threads, Twitter has reportedly threatened to sue Meta.
Twitter lawyer Alex Spiro sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg accusing the company of intentionally stealing “Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property,” according to a report by Semafor.
“Competition is fine, cheating is not,” Twitter Executive Chairman and Chief Technology Officer Elon Musk tweeted in response to the report Thursday.
Spiro accused Meta of getting Twitter’s secrets by hiring dozens of former Twitter employees and claimed the Facebook parent company put them to work making a Twitter copycat, using their insider knowledge to speed up development of the Threads app — which is “in violation of both state and federal law as well as those employees’ ongoing obligations to Twitter,” Spiro said in the letter.
Meta communications director Andy Stone rebutted the accusations, saying in a Thread that “no one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing.”
Threads launched Wednesday, with Meta positioning the new social media app as a Twitter rival. You can sign up for Threads using your Instagram credentials and keep your username, followers and verification status. Here’s everything you need to know about Threads, which reached 30 million sign ups in just 16 hours, according to Zuckerberg.
Read more: Why You May Not Want to Sign Up for Threads, Meta’s New Twitter Competitor
Source: CNET
