Twitter has threatened to sue Facebook owner Meta over its new Threads platform, it has been reported.
The company has written to Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg to say it “intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights, according to news site Semafor, citing a letter from Twitter lawyer Alex Spiro.
“It demands that Meta take immediate steps to stop using any Twitter trade secrets or other highly confidential information,” Mr Spiro reportedly wrote in the letter.
Meta launched its new Threads platform earlier on Thursday. The tech giant, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, claimed it had already had 30 million sign-ups.
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Threads has been billed by experts as Meta’s answer to Twitter – which has faced a period of upheaval since Elon Musk completed his $44bn takeover in October last year.
The Tesla and SpaceX chief sacked half of Twitter’s 8,000 workers following his buyout.
He also removed the previous verification system and replaced it with his own paid-for Twitter Blue scheme
According to Semafor, Mr Spiro, in his letter, accused Meta of hiring former Twitter employees who “had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information”.
Built by the Meta’s Instagram team, Threads is billed as a home for “sharing text updates and joining public conversations”.
Posts can be up to 500 characters long and include links, photos, and videos of up to five minutes.
They appear in a timeline, and posts can be liked, reposted, replied to, and shared elsewhere. But posts do not appear chronologically, and there seems to be no way to make it so.
Users will be able to follow celebrities, athletes, and friends, many of whom will have jumped over from Instagram.
