Twitter threatens legal action against Meta over new Threads platform

The rivalry between Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk has stepped up a gear, as ITV News Correspondent Robert Moore reports

Twitter has threatened legal action against Meta over its new, text-based app called Threads.

In a letter sent on Wednesday and addressed to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Alex Spiro, a lawyer representing Twitter, accused Meta of unlawfully using Twitter's trade secrets and other intellectual property by hiring former Twitter employees to create a “copycat” app.

“Competition is fine, cheating is not,” Twitter owner Elon Musk tweeted on Thursday.

Since launching Threads on Wednesday night, Meta's new app has collected tens of millions of sign-ups. The app, which was created by the company's Instagram team, arrives at a time when many are looking for Twitter alternatives to escape Musk’s raucous oversight of the platform since acquiring it last year.

Meta spokesperson Andy Stone responded to the report of Spiro's letter on Thursday afternoon, writing on Threads: “No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee - that’s just not a thing.”

In the letter, which news site Semafor first reported on Thursday, Spiro said that Twitter “intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights” - and noted the company's right to seek civil remedies or injunctive relief. He added that the letter marked a “formal notice” for Meta to preserve documents relevant for a potential dispute between the companies.

Musk hasn't directly tweeted about the possibility of legal action, but he has replied to several snarky takes on the Threads launch. The Twitter owner responded to one tweet suggesting that Meta’s app was built largely through the use of the copy and paste function, with a laughing emoji.

Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino has also not publicly commented on Wednesday's letter, but seemingly appeared to address Threads' launch in a Thursday tweet.

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“We’re often imitated -- but the Twitter community can never be duplicated,” Yaccarino wrote.

Still, some analysts say Meta's new app could be a significant headache for Twitter - pointing to the excitement surrounding Threads' launch and impressive download numbers so far.

Success for the app isn't guaranteed, of course. Industry watchers point to Meta’s track record of starting standalone apps that were later shut down, for example, and note that Threads is still in its early days - so time will tell.

Meta’s new app has also raised data privacy concerns. While Threads launched in more than 100 countries on Wednesday, it is notably unavailable in the European Union, which has strict data privacy rules.