Threads, the app launched by Meta to take on struggling Twitter, has run into legal trouble just hours after its launch. While the app has already gained over 30 million users since being launched on Thursday, its rival has threatened a lawsuit, claiming that Threads violates Twitter's "intellectual property rights".
Elon Musk's lawyer Alex Spiro has written to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, accusing him of "unlawful misappropriation of Twitter's trade secrets and other intellectual property". The letter was first published by the news outlet Semafor.
The letter accused Meta of hiring dozens of former Twitter employees who "had and continue to have access to Twitter's trade secrets and other highly confidential information."
"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," Alex Spiro wrote in the letter.
Elon Musk, in response to a tweet citing the news said, "Competition is fine, cheating is not."
Meta claimed that no one in the engineering team at Threads is a former Twitter employee.
"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.
Threads is the biggest challenger yet to Musk-owned Twitter, which has seen a series of potential competitors emerge but not yet replace one of the world's biggest social media platforms, despite its struggles.
On Threads, people can post text and links and reply to or repost messages from others - an offering similar to Twitter's.
Instagram and Facebook, both owned by Meta, have a long - and successful - history of copying products from upstart internet competitors. The company's Reels feature was a knockoff of TikTok's viral video app, and its Stories disappearing posts followed the rise of Snapchat.
