In a letter sent by Twitter lawyer Alex Spiro to Facebook’s parent CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter threatened to sue Meta Platform over its new Threads platform. Meta, which launched Threads on Wednesday and has more than 30 million signups, wants to take advantage of Elon Musk’s Twitter and Instagram’s billions of users.
Spiro, in his letter, accused Meta of hiring former Twitter employees who “had and continue to access Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information,” news website Semafour first reported.
“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 Reuters source confirmed the contents of the letter on Thursday. Spiro did not respond to a Reuters request for comment. “No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — it’s not just one thing,” Meta spokesman Andy Stone said in a thread post. “
Meta owns Facebook as well as Instagram. Since Musk took over the social media platform last October, Twitter has seen Mastodon and Bluesky compete, among others. Thread’s user interface, however, is similar to the microblogging platform.
However, threads do not support keyword searches or direct messages. To press a trade secret theft claim against Meta, Twitter needs far more detail than what’s in the letter, according to intellectual property law experts, including Stanford law professor Mark Lemley.
