In a letter sent by Twitter lawyer Alex Spiro to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter threatened to sue Meta Platform over its new Threads platform, reports RTE.
Meta, which launched Threads on Wednesday and has more than 30 million sign-ups, is looking to take over Elon Musk’s Twitter, benefiting billions of Instagram users.
Threads are currently not available in Ireland and the European Union as Meta continues to evaluate new EU regulatory changes to online platforms.
As first reported by news site Semaphore, Spiro accused Meta of hiring former Twitter employees who “had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information,” News website Semafor first reported, reports RTE.
“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. No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee – that’s just not a thing,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a Threads post, reports RTE.
A former senior Twitter employee told Reuters they were not aware of any former employees working on the thread or any senior employees landing at Meta.
Meanwhile, Twitter owner Musk said “Competition is fine, cheating is not,” in response to a tweet quoting the news.
Meta owns Instagram and Facebook.
Since its acquisition of social media platform Musk last October, Twitter has seen competition from Mastodon and Bluesky, among others. Thread’s user interface, however, is similar to that of microblogging platforms.
However, Thread does not support keyword searches or direct messages.
To file a trade secret theft claim against Meta, Twitter needs far more detail than what’s in the letter, intellectual property law experts including Stanford law professor Mark Lemley have said.
“The mere hiring of former Twitter employees (who Twitter itself laid off or drove away) and the fact that Facebook created a somewhat similar site is unlikely to support a trade secrets claim,” he said, reports RTE.
Companies sued for theft of trade secrets must show they made reasonable efforts to protect their corporate secrets, says NYU professor Gene Frommer. The cases often involved protected systems that had been compromised in some way.
Twitter’s new challenge is a series of chaotic decisions that have alienated users and advertisers alike, including Musk’s recent move to limit the number of tweets users can read per day.
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