Twitter fires lawsuit threat to Meta over Threads app

In a brewing battle between social media giants, Twitter has issued a stern warning to Meta, the parent company of Facebook, threatening to take legal action over alleged violations of its intellectual property rights. 

Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's CEO, openly introduced Threads as a direct competitor to Twitter, further fueling the tension.

The letter, initially disclosed by news outlet Semafor, reveals that Twitter's lawyer, Alex Spiro, accused Meta of engaging in systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter's trade secrets and other valuable intellectual property.

Meta made waves in the social media landscape with the launch of Threads, a text-based conversation app aimed at challenging Twitter's dominance. 

The app's debut on Wednesday was met with widespread acclaim, as it quickly amassed an astounding 30 million sign-ups within a mere 24 hours, positioning it as the fastest-downloaded app in history.

This strategic move further fueled Threads' rapid adoption and set the stage for its ambitious goal of becoming a "public conversations app with 1 billion+ people," as expressed by Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's CEO.

Zuckerberg expressed his satisfaction and remarked that Threads' performance in its initial stages exceeded expectations. 

In a thread on Thursday, he stated, "This is as good of a start as we could have hoped for!" 

According to Twitter's cease-and-desist letter, Meta allegedly assigned these employees, some of whom still possess Twitter documents or electronic devices, to expedite the development of Threads by leveraging Twitter's intellectual property and trade secrets. 

Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, voiced his opinion on the matter, tweeting, "Competition is fine, cheating is not," lending support to Twitter's stance.

Responding to the allegations, Andy Stone, posted on Threads that none of the engineers on the Threads team were former Twitter employees.