Twitter accuses Meta of stealing trade secrets with new app Threads, threatens legal action

Twitter said it has "serious concerns" about Meta’s new app, Threads, over its purported theft of intellectual property and trade secrets. 

FOX Business confirmed that Twitter lawyer Alex Spiro sent Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg a letter on Wednesday accusing Meta Platforms of having "engaged in systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property."

The letter, first obtained by Semafor, alleges that Meta has hired "dozens" of former Twitter employees who "had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information." 

"With that knowledge, Meta deliberately assigned these employees to develop, in a matter of months, Meta’s copycat "Threads" app with the specific intent that they use Twitter’s trade secrets and intellectual property in order to accelerate the development of Meta’s competing app." 

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Spiro said Twitter will continue to enforce intellectual property rights, and "demands that Meta take immediate steps to stop using any Twitter trade secrets or other highly confidential information." 

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Meta told Semafor that Twitter’s accusations were "baseless." 

"No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee – that’s just not a thing," a source said. 

Twitter CEO Elon Musk weighed in on the controversy Thursday, tweeting: "Competition is fine, cheating is not." 

Threads, Meta’s text-based app seemingly intended to rival Twitter, went live on Wednesday, becoming available to users in more than 100 countries and millions signed up within its first hours. 

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Threads, which Meta says provides "a new, separate space for real-time updates and public conversations," arrives at a time when many are looking for Twitter alternatives to escape Elon Musk's raucous oversight of the platform since acquiring it last year for $44 billion. But Meta's new app has also raised data privacy concerns, and is notably unavailable in the European Union.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.