Elon Musk’s Twitter threatens legal action over Threads app, Meta hits back

Twitter is contemplating taking legal action against Meta, the parent company of Facebook, due to concerns arising from its newly launched Threads app. Semafor, a news platform, has obtained a letter from Twitter lawyer Alex Spiro addressed to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in which Spiro asserts that Meta utilized Twitter’s proprietary information and intellectual property to develop Threads.

Spiro states that Meta hired a significant number of former Twitter employees, possibly capitalizing on the substantial layoffs that occurred after Elon Musk assumed control of the company. The letter alleges that these former Twitter employees still possess access to Twitter’s confidential information and trade secrets. Twitter claims that Meta took advantage of this situation by assigning these employees to create an app that closely imitates Twitter, thus violating both state and federal laws.

In the letter, Spiro emphasized Twitter’s commitment to protecting its intellectual property rights vigorously and insisted that Meta promptly cease utilizing any Twitter trade secrets or other extremely confidential information.

In light of these accusations, Twitter has issued a stern warning, indicating its intention to pursue legal recourse through civil remedies and seek injunctive relief. The company insists that Meta promptly halt the utilization of any Twitter trade secrets or highly confidential information. Additionally, Twitter explicitly states that Meta is not granted authorization to crawl or scrape Twitter’s data.

In response to Twitter’s allegations, Meta has responded to a post on Threads authored by Andy Stone, the communications director. Stone rebuts Twitter’s claims, asserting that none of the engineers working on the Threads team have prior experience at Twitter. Meta appears relatively unfazed by the allegations, potentially influenced by Twitter’s track record of issuing legal threats. It is worth noting that in May, Twitter accused Microsoft of misusing its API about integrations with specific Microsoft products. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, is the entity involved in this situation.

Despite the ongoing legal dispute, Meta went ahead with the release of Threads, primarily targeting celebrities and brands as early users. Remarkably, within a mere 24 hours of its launch, Threads has already garnered a user base of over 30 million registered users. Meta’s stock showed a 3 percent increase in closing on Wednesday, surpassing the gains made by rival technology companies.

Elon Musk weighed in on the matter via a Twitter comment, stating, “Competition is acceptable, but cheating is not.” Musk’s response further intensifies the existing rivalry between the two companies.