Twitter has threatened to sue Meta over its new Threads platform, US-based publication Semafor reported on Thursday, citing a letter sent to its head Mark Zuckerberg by Twitter’s lawyer Alex Spiro.
On its debut day, Meta’s newly launched Threads app garnered 30 million users, according to Zuckerberg. The app is being positioned as a “friendly” competitor to Twitter, which was acquired by Elon Musk last year.
“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.
In his letter, 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,” the report said.
Since Musk’s takeover of the social media platform, Twitter has seen competition from Mastodon and Bluesky among others. Threads’ user interface, however, has a striking resemblance to the microblogging platform.
The app, billed as the text version of Meta’s photo-sharing platform Instagram, became available Wednesday night to users in more than 100 countries — including the US, Britain, Australia, Canada and Japan.
Threads, which Meta says provides “a new, separate space for real-time updates and public conversations.” However, the new app has also raised data privacy concerns and is notably unavailable in the European Union.