Instagram Threads Launch: Twitter threatens to drag Meta to court, war begins between Musk-Zuckerberg

Twitter Accuses Meta over Threads App: Meta Platforms’ new app Threads has created a buzz within a day of its launch. This new app of Mark Zuckerberg is being called Twitter Clone. Now Twitter has written a letter to Meta platform threatening to go to court. Twitter’s lawyer Alex Spiro has sent a letter threatening to go to court to Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook’s parent company Meta. More than 50 million users have signed up for Meta’s new app Threads in just one day. It looks like the new Threads app will give a tough competition to Elon Musk’s Twitter by taking advantage of Instagram’s millions of users.

Twitter accuses Meta of stealing trade secrets

In its letter, Twitter’s attorneys accused Meta of recruiting former Twitter employees “who had access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information.” News website Semafor first made this information public.

Spiro wrote in his letter, ‘Twitter intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property (intellectual property) rights and we demand that Meta stop using any trade secret or highly confidential information of Twitter with immediate effect.’ News agency Reuters also confirmed the information written in the letter citing sources related to the matter.

Meta spokesman Andy Stone said in a Threads post, ‘Threads’ engineering team does not include any former Twitter employees – there is no such thing.’

A former senior Twitter employee told Reuters he was not aware of any former Twitter staff working at Threads, nor of any senior employees joining Meta. Meanwhile, owner Elon Musk tweeted about this news and said, ‘Competition is fine, cheating is not’ (Competition is good, not dishonesty.)’

Let us tell you that the parent company of both Instagram and Facebook is Meta. And Elon Musk bought the social media platform Twitter in October 2022 in a deal worth $44 billion. Twitter has also got good competition from Mastodon and Bluesky during this period. But talk about new Threads, its user interface has a glimpse of Twitter.

However, Threads does not currently support keyword searches or direct messages. Mark Lemley, an intellectual property law expert and law professor at Stanford, said that to prove the trade secret theft claim against Meta, Twitter would need more information than what was written in the letter. He further added that, “The recruitment of former Twitter employees (who were fired by Twitter itself) and the fact that Facebook created a site like Twitter should not be expected to support the claim of trade secret theft.”

With inputs from news agency Reuters