Twitter Threatens to Sue Meta for its “Copycat” Threads App

Threads, the new Twitter clone launched by Meta earlier this week has been generating a lot of interest, and Twitter isn’t happy about it. Indeed, Semafor reported yesterday that Twitter is now threatening Meta with a lawsuit for launching a “copycat” app that violates Twitter’s intellectual property.

In a letter sent to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Alex Spiro, a lawyer for Twitter accused Meta of poaching ex-Twitter employees who “had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information.”

The lawyer added that Meta “deliberately assigned these employees to develop, in a matter of months, Meta’s copycat “Threads” app with the specific intent that they use Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property in order to accelerate the development of Meta’s competing app, in violation of both state and federal law as well as those employee’s ongoing obligations to Twitter.”

Speaking with Semafor, Andy Stone, Meta’s Communications director promptly dismissed these accusations. “No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing,” the exec said.

After acquiring Twitter last fall, Elon Musk’s first big move was to eliminate over half of the company’s workforce to cut costs. And the company did so in a pretty brutal way, with Elon Musk even making fun of employees being laid off.

“I would like to apologize for firing these geniuses. Their immense talent will no doubt be of great use elsewhere,” Musk wrote on November 15 in a sarcastic tweet that definitely didn’t age well. Yesterday, Musk had completely changed his tone and tweeted that “competition is fine, cheating is not.”

Even if Meta did hire ex-Twitter employees, as Spiro claimed, the company has every right to do so. Anyway, it’s hard to imagine how a huge company like Meta running apps used by billions of users didn’t already have the scale and talent to build a Twitter competitor on its own.

Meta said yesterday that Threads was created by the Instagram team, and that’s why you need an Instagram account to use the app. As of today, users can post messages (up to 500 words), pictures, and videos, but Twitter-like hashtags are not supported. There’s also no chronological timeline and private messages, and the web app is view-only.

Despite these limitations, Mark Zuckerberg wrote shared on his Threads profile yesterday that the app had already crossed 30 million signups. “Feels like the beginning of something special, but we’ve got a lot of work ahead to build out the app,” the Meta CEO said.