Threads, Meta's response to Twitter, has been live for just about 24 hours and it's already stirring up some legal trouble.
Per reports from both ABC News and Semafor, Twitter's legal team has allegedly accused Meta of "deliberately" copying the Twitter application and poaching former Twitter employees to do so.
"Over the past year, Meta has hired dozens of former Twitter employees," many of which have "improperly retained Twitter documents and electronic devices" and "continue to have access to Twitter's trade secrets and other highly confidential information," reads a cease-and-desist letter from lawyer Alex Spiro.
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"With that knowledge," Spiro continued, "Meta deliberately assigned these employees to develop, in a matter of months, Meta's copycat 'Threads' apps with the specific intent that they use Twitter's trade secrets ... in violation of both state and federal law as well as those employees' ongoing obligations to Twitter."
"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," the letter went on. Twitter "reserves all rights," including "the right to seek both civil remedies and injunctive relief."
A Meta source denied the Twitter team's accusations. "No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee," the source told Semafor. "That's just not a thing."
And if the threat of legal action is raining on Meta's parade, the company is certainly not letting it show. On Thursday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Threads had amassed about 30 million sign-ups as of that morning. "Feels like the beginning of something special," he wrote on the platform, "but we've got a lot of work ahead to build out the app."
Perhaps adding insult to injury, Zuckerberg also on Thursday posted what Semafor quantified as his first tweet in 11 years. Hey Elon, how about that fight?
