In a letter to Facebook parent company CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter’s lawyer Alex Spiro threatened to sue Meta Platforms (META.O) over its new Threads platform
Meta, which debuted Threads on Wednesday and has over 30 million sign-ups, is attempting to compete with Elon Musk’s Twitter by utilising Instagram’s billions of users.
Spiro accused Meta in his letter of recruiting former Twitter employees who “had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information,” according to news website Semafor.
Competition is fine, cheating is not
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 6, 2023
“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 stated in the letter.
On Thursday, a Reuters source with knowledge of the letter verified its contents. Spiro did not respond to a request for comment from Reuters.
“No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing,” claimed Meta spokesperson Andy Stone in a Threads post.
A former senior Twitter employee told Reuters they were not aware of any former staffers working on Threads, nor any senior personnel who landed at Meta at all.
Meanwhile, Twitter owner Musk said, “Competition is fine, cheating is not,” in response to a tweet citing the news./Reuters