Twitter threatened legal action over Meta's decision to release its Twitter clone Instagram Threads, arguing that the Facebook parent company had taken former Twitter employees to create a copycat.
Twitter lawyer Alex Spiro sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday accusing it of stealing the company's intellectual property. The legal threat arrived less than a day after Zuckerberg launched Threads, which saw its user base surge to more than 30 million in a day. Twitter's lawsuit arrives as the company struggles to keep advertisers on the platform.
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Spiro accused Meta of "systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter's trade secrets and other intellectual property," according to a letter draft acquired by Semafor.
"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 added. "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."
Spiro also accused Meta of hiring employees from Twitter who had access to the company's trade secrets and asking them to make the Twitter clone.
Twitter fired 80% of its employees over an extended period after Elon Musk acquired the company.
"No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that's just not a thing,' Meta spokesman Andy Stone posted in response.
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Threads are where "communities come together to discuss everything from the topics you care about today to what'll be trending tomorrow," according to Meta. The app acquired more than 30 million users within the first 24 hours of the app's launch.
Threads arrived at the right time for Meta to offer an alternative to disgruntled Twitter users. Musk ran into technical troubles on Saturday when he announced that the company was limiting how many tweets users could view daily. The company saw its ad sales drop 59% year over year in June.