Global Courant
Twitter has threatened to sue Meta Platforms over its new Threads platform in a letter sent by Twitter’s attorney Alex Spiro to parent company CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Meta, which launched Threads on Wednesday and has registered more than 30 million logins, looks set to take on Elon Musk’s Twitter by leveraging Instagram’s billions of users.
Spiro, in his letter, 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.
“Twitter intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights and demands that Meta take immediate steps to stop using Twitter trade secrets or other highly confidential information,” Spiro wrote in the letter.
A Reuters source with knowledge of the letter confirmed its contents on Thursday. Spiro did not respond to a Reuters request for comment.
“No one on the Threads technical team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just nothing,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a statement. Post discussions.
A former senior Twitter employee told Reuters they were not aware of any former staffers who worked on Threads, nor any senior staff who landed at Meta.
Meanwhile, Twitter owner Musk said, “Competition is fine, cheating isn’t,” in response to a tweet quoting the news.
Meta owns both Instagram and Facebook.
Since Musk’s acquisition of the social media platform last October, Twitter has faced competition from the likes of Mastodon and Bluesky. However, the Threads user interface resembles the microblogging platform.
Still, Threads doesn’t support keyword searches or direct messages.
To file a trade secret theft claim against Meta, Twitter would need much more detail than what’s in the letter, according to intellectual property law experts including Stanford professor Mark Lemley.
“The mere hiring of former Twitter employees (whom Twitter itself fired or fired) and the fact that Facebook created a somewhat similar site probably doesn’t support trade secrets,” he said.
Jeanne Fromer, a professor at New York University, said companies claiming trade secret theft must demonstrate that they have made reasonable efforts to protect their trade secrets. Cases often revolve around secure systems that have been bypassed in some way.
Twitter’s latest challenge follows a series of chaotic decisions that have alienated both users and advertisers, including Musk’s latest move to limit the number of tweets users can read per day.
(Reporting by Akash Sriram, Tiyashi Datta in Bengaluru, and by Jody Godoy and Katie Paul in New York; edited by Shailesh Kuber and Josie Kao)
