Twitter, led by Elon Musk, has issued a legal threat against Meta (formerly Facebook) over their new platform, Instagram Threads. The Twitter lawyer, Alex Spiro, accused Meta of unlawfully using Twitter's trade secrets and poaching former employees to create a similar platform.
Within just 24 hours, Threads gained over 30 million users. Spiro sent a letter to Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, demanding that they cease using any confidential information belonging to Twitter. Twitter intends to protect its intellectual property rights through legal action if necessary.
"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 her letter.
"Twitter reserves all rights, including, but not limited to, the right to seek both civil remedies and injunctive relief without further notice to prevent any further retention, disclosure, or use of its intellectual property by Meta," the Twitter lawyer added.
Spiro also claimed that Meta had hired multiple former Twitter employees who had access to Twitter's trade secrets. Elon Musk said in a tweet on Friday: "Competition is fine, cheating is not."
In response, Meta's communications director, Andy Stone, dismissed Twitter's accusations as unfounded, stating that no members of the Threads engineering team were former Twitter employees.
"No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee - that's just not a thing," he was quoted as saying.
Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino appealed to the Twitter community, acknowledging the importance of everyone's voice and emphasizing that the Twitter community is unique and cannot be replicated.
"Whether you're here to watch history unfold, discover real-time information all over the world, share your opinions, or learn about others -- on Twitter you can be real," Yaccarino posted. "You built the Twitter community. And that's irreplaceable. This is your public square," she added.
Yaccarino said that "we are often imitated but the Twitter community can never be duplicated".
