Twitter’s legal team has sent a letter to Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg, threatening to sue the company over its new Threads platform. The letter, written by Twitter’s lawyer Alex Spiro, accuses Meta of hiring former Twitter employees who have “had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information.” Spiro demands that Meta take immediate steps to stop using any Twitter trade secrets or other highly confidential information. The letter claims that Meta is leveraging Instagram’s billions of users to take on Elon Musk’s Twitter.
Meta has responded to the allegations, denying that any former Twitter employees are working on Threads. A Meta spokesperson, Andy Stone, wrote in a Threads post that “no one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing.” A former senior Twitter employee also told Reuters that they are not aware of any former staffers working on Threads, nor any senior personnel who landed at Meta.
However, intellectual property law experts are skeptical that Twitter’s claims will hold up in court. Stanford law professor Mark Lemley notes that “the mere hiring of former Twitter employees and the fact that Facebook created a somewhat similar site is unlikely to support a trade secrets claim.” New York University professor Jeanne Fromer agrees, saying that companies alleging trade secret theft must show that they made reasonable efforts to protect their corporate secrets.
Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg (Via Mark Zuckerberg/Twitter)
The controversy comes as Twitter is facing a series of challenges, including a decline in user engagement and a loss of advertisers due to Musk’s recent decision to limit the number of tweets users can read per day. The platform is also competing with other social media platforms, including Mastodon and Bluesky. Meanwhile, Meta’s Threads platform has already logged over 30 million sign-ups and is available on Instagram.
In response to the news, Twitter owner Elon Musk tweeted “Competition is fine, cheating is not.” Musk’s takeover of Twitter last October has led to a series of turbulent decisions, including the layoffs of hundreds of employees and the introduction of new features that are proving unpopular with users. The threads’ lack of support for keyword searches and direct messages has also been criticized, making it seem like a less functional alternative to Twitter. Despite these challenges, Twitter is determined to protect its intellectual property and will continue to pursue any legal action necessary to protect its trade secrets.
