Twitter Threatens to Sue Meta Over Fledgling Rival Social Media App

Twitter threatened to sue Meta for allegedly misappropriating Twitter’s trade secrets when building its new text-based social media app, Threads. Meta launched the new app Wednesday and had accumulated more than 70 million users by Friday.

Twitter has “serious concerns” Meta has “engaged in systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property,” Twitter attorney Alex Spiro wrote Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg Wednesday in a cease-and-desist letter.

The letter notes Meta hired “dozens” of former Twitter employees over the past year, and those employees have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and “highly confidential information.” Many of the employees “improperly retained” Twitter documents and electronic devices, the letter claims: Meta “deliberately” assigned these employees to develop a “copycat” app with specific intent of using Twitter trade secrets. Twitter reserves the right to pursue civil remedies and injunctive relief if Meta doesn’t stop using Twitter trade secrets and confidential information, said Spiro.

No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee, said Meta Meta spokesperson Andy Stone in a post Thursday on the new platform: “That’s just not a thing.” Twitter Executive Chairman Elon Musk tweeted Thursday: “Competition is fine, cheating is not.” CEO Linda Yaccarino said Twitter is “often imitated” but “can never be duplicated.” Zuckerberg tweeted Wednesday for the first time in 11 years.

Meta is “expressly prohibited” from “crawling or scraping” Twitter’s followers or follower data, Spiro wrote. Twitter’s terms of service prohibit any crawling of platform data unless it’s done in accordance with Twitter’s robots.text file, which disallows scraping of follower data, he said. Spiro wrote Meta must preserve all documents that could be relevant to a dispute between Twitter, Meta and former Twitter employees.

An Instagram team built Threads, according to Meta. The goal is to expand Instagram with this text-based platform that offers real-time updates and public conversation, said the company. Prominent celebrities joining the platform include Oprah Winfrey, Will Smith, Jennifer Lopez, Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian and Shakira.

Zuckerberg posted on the platform Friday, saying Threads’ 70 million sign-ups is “way beyond our expectations.” The company claimed 5 million sign-ups within the first four hours of the platform’s launch. He said in a separate post the goal now is to make sure the product works well first, then see if there’s a clear path to 1 billion users and figure out how to monetize the product. There should be a “public conversations app” with more than 1 billion users, he said: “Twitter has had the opportunity to do this but hasn’t nailed it. Hopefully we will.”