Twitter has threatened to take legal action against Meta over the new text based app threads less than 24 hours after its launch.
Threads, which was launched to millions on Wednesday, is similar to Twitter and has been pitched by Meta bosses as a friendly alternative.
Elon Musk said “competition is fine but cheating is not”.
Meta has denied claims in a legal letter that ex-Twitter staff helped create Threads.
In a letter sent to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter’s lawyer Alex Spiro has accused the company of using the latter’s trade secrets by ‘hiring dozens of former employees of the blue-bird app’.
“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 wrote in the letter. He added that it is a “formal notice” for Meta to preserve documents relevant for a potential dispute between the companies.
Andy Stone, Meta spokesperson, in a Threads post, asserted that the engineering team at Threads does not consist of any former Twitter employees.
Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino, in an apparent reference to Threads, tweeted, “We’re often imitated — but the Twitter community can never be duplicated.”