Twitter is threatening legal action against Threads from Meta. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, received a letter yesterday from Twitter accusing him of violating intellectual rights.
Yesterday, the social media platform Threads took off. This is a new application from Meta that originated as a Twitter competitor. The platform launched on July 6 in America and registered more than 10 million users in seven hours.
Read also: Threads launches with 10 million signups in 7 hours, looks like Twitter
Twitter copy
Initial reviews of the new platform mainly agreed that Threads was clearly being developed as a Twitter rival. Threads is described as the child of Twitter and Instagram.
At Twitter, they appear to be in complete agreement with that statement. The company is therefore threatening to sue Meta. Zuckerberg received a letter about it, accusing him of “systematic, intentional and unlawful infringement of trade secrets and other intellectual property.” So writes the digital news brand Semafor, which was able to access the letter.
There is allegedly a lot of Twitter knowledge in-house at Meta, as the company recruited former employees of the messaging service. Moreover, the employees all had access to company-sensitive information about Twitter during the time they worked there.
The letter, therefore, asks Meta to take the new application Threads offline immediately. Otherwise, the case will have to go to court.
First reactions
Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, seems to confirm the rumors online. In a tweet, someone cited the letter, to which Musk responded by saying “Competition is fine, cheating is not.”
According to Meta, then, the accusations are lies. Andy Stone, director of Meta’s communications team, writes on Instagram, “To be clear: No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing.”