In a letter to Facebook CEO; Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter’s attorney Alex Spiro threatened to sue Meta over its new Threads platform.
By utilizing Instagram’s billions of users, Meta, which began Threads on Wednesday and has received more than 30 million sign-ups, hopes to compete with Elon Musk’s Twitter.
In his letter, Mr. Spiro accused Meta of employing former Twitter workers who “had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information,” according to the news website Semafor.
“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,” Mr Spiro wrote in the letter.
Andy Stone; a representative for Meta, wrote in a Threads article that “no one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing.”
A former top Twitter employee claimed that they were unaware of any previous employees working on Threads or any senior staff members who joined Meta.
Meanwhile, Twitter owner Mr. Musk said, “Competition is fine, cheating is not,” in response to a tweet citing the news.
Facebook and Instagram are both owned by Meta.
Mastodon and Bluesky, among others, have competed with Twitter since Elon Musk took control of the social media platform last October. However, the user interface of Threads is similar to the microblogging service.
However, neither keyword searches nor direct messaging are supported by Threads.
According to intellectual property law experts like Stanford law professor Mark Lemley, Twitter would require substantially more information than what is provided in the letter to successfully prosecute a claim against Meta for trade secret theft.
“The mere hiring of former Twitter employees (who Twitter itself laid off or drove away) and the fact that Facebook created a site that is somewhat similar is unlikely to support a trade secrets claim,” he said.
According to Jeanne Fromer, a professor at New York University, businesses alleging trade secret theft must demonstrate that they took reasonable steps to safeguard their proprietary information. Secure mechanisms that were somehow thwarted are a common theme in cases.
The most recent threat to Twitter comes after a string of erratic choices that have alienated both users and advertisers, including Mr. Musk’s most recent decision to restrict the number of tweets that users may read each day.
However, Threads is not yet available in EU countries due to concerns over GDPR and privacy rules.