'Misappropriation of Trade Secrets': Twitter Threatens To Sue Meta Over Threads

Threads, which was launched by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday, has already gained over 30 million subscribers.

Elon Musk (left) and Mark Zuckerberg. 

(Photo: Twitter/Altered by The Quint) 

Twitter has allegedly threatened Meta with a lawsuit following the latter's successful launch of the platform Threads, which is being seen as the greatest challenger so far to the Elon Musk-owned micro-blogging website.

Threads, which was launched by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday, 6 July, has already gained over 30 million subscribers.

Musk's lawyer is said to have written a letter to Zuckerberg, accusing him of "unlawful misappropriation of Twitter's trade secrets and other intellectual property," according to news outlet Semafor.

Twitter also accused Meta of hiring several of its former 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," the letter added.

Musk also reacted to the letter through a tweet, saying, "Competition is fine, cheating is not."

However, Meta claimed that nobody in the Threads engineering team is a former employee of Twitter.

"No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee - that's just not a thing," Meta spokesman Andy Stone took to Threads to say.

According to a blog post by its parent company, Threads is meant "for sharing text updates and joining public conversations." But the design and user interface of the new app is quite brazen in its resemblance to Twitter. 

(With inputs from Semafor.)