Twitter vowed to sue Meta only hours after the Instagram parent company debuted Threads, an app it thinks can outperform Elon Musk’s faltering site.
Musk lawyer Alex Spiro accused the corporation of “unlawful” behavior in a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg released on Thursday by online news outlet Semafor.
misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property.”
The letter accused Meta of hiring dozens of former Twitter employees who “had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information.”
Within a few hours, more than 30 million people had downloaded Threads, Zuckerberg said Thursday.
“Feels like the beginning of something special, but we’ve got a lot of work ahead to build the app,” Zuckerberg wrote on his official Threads account.
Accounts for celebrities such as Jennifer Lopez, Shakira, Oprah Winfrey, and Hugh Jackman, as well as media organisations such as The Washington Post and The Economist, were already active.
Zuckerberg wrote: “It’ll take some time, but I think there should be a public conversations app with 1 billion+ people on it.”
“Twitter has had the opportunity to do this but hasn’t nailed it. Hopefully we will.”
Twitter claims to have over 200 million daily users.
Meanwhile, Musk shared a graphic depicting the Threads logo as a tapeworm. “Metaphorically, too,” he added.
Musk stated in another tweet, referring to Twitter’s anticipated legal action against Meta, that “competition is fine, cheating is not.”
“No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing,” claimed Meta spokesman Andy Stone on Threads.
