Twitter threatens Meta with lawsuit over ‘Threads’, claims it violated Twitter’s intellectual property rights

Twitter is not taking its newfound competition with Meta over Threads lying down. Elon Musk’s social media company has now threatened to sue Meta over the new Threads platform, alleging violation of its intellectual property rights. Threads meanwhile, recorded a staggering 30 million sign ups on day one of launch, even as Twitter is failing to put to rest, the chaos it has engulfed in since Musk takeover.

Twitter lawyer Alex Spiro sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, threatening to sue Meta less than 24 hours after the launch of the Threads app in over 100 countries, according Semafor‘s report. Twitter has accused Meta of poaching former twitter employees (of which there is no lack, given the thousands that were fired in the first few months of the Musk regime) to create the new platform.

If you aren’t aware already, the new Threads app has proven to be an instant hit. It has been less then 24 hours since it went live on iOS and Android, and already, the number of signups has crossed the 30 million mark. The text-based conversation app still lacks multiple features (for example, it does not support keyword searches or direct messages), but its deep integration with Instagram and its ability to leverage Instagram’s wide user base are points in its favour.

If Threads maintains this performance (and there is no reason why it shouldn’t), then it will easily surpass OpenAI’s ChatGPT as the most rapidly downloaded consumer app at launch. Some of the reasons for these amazing numbers include frustrated Twitter users finding a suitable alternative to the chaos-ridden micro-blogging site, whose recent decisions of enacting and pulling back new policies has not helped its case at all.

This spectacular performance of Meta’s new Twitter clone has now earned the parent company of Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp the ire of Twitter, which claimed that the company violated Twitter’s “intellectual property rights” and accused the social media company of engaging in “systemic, wilful and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property.”

According to the letter sent to Zuckerberg, Meta hired “dozens” of former Twitter employees who had access to highly confidential information about the platform, many of whom had “improperly retained Twitter documents and electronic devices.” Musk, who is also the owner of Twitter, said that “Competition is fine, cheating is not.” Meta, for its part, refuted Twitter’s claims, announcing that there were no former Twitter employees on the Threads engineering team.