Twitter attorney Alex Spiro delivered to the CEO of Facebook parent company Meta Platforms (META.O) on Thursday, Twitter has threatened to sue the company over its new Threads platform.
By utilizing Instagram’s billions of users, Meta, which began Threads on Wednesday and has received more than 30 million sign-ups, hopes to compete with Elon Musk’s Twitter.
Spiro charged Meta with recruiting ex-Twitter workers who “had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information,” according to the report.
“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.
According to Meta representative Andy Stone, “no one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing.”
A former senior Twitter employee who spoke to Reuters said that neither senior staff members who joined Meta nor any former employees working on Threads are known.
Mastodon and Bluesky, among others, have contested Twitter since Musk took control of the social media platform. But the user interface of Threads is quite similar to that of the microblogging service.
However, neither keyword searches nor direct messaging are supported by Threads.
An inquiry for comment from Reuters did not receive a prompt response from Spiro.
Reporting by Katie Paul in New York, Tiyashi Datta in Bengaluru, and Akash Sriram; editing by Shailesh Kuber
Content Source: Reuters.com
