Twitter has threatened to sue Facebook parent company Meta over its new Threads app, which Mark Zuckerberg described as a rival, claiming the company has violated Twitter’s “intellectual property rights”.

In a letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, published by Semafor, a lawyer for Twitter said the company “has serious concerns that Meta Platforms (Meta) has engaged in systematic, willful and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property.”

Twitter intends to vigorously protect its intellectual property rights and demands that Meta cease exploiting any Twitter trade secrets or other highly private information immediately.” In the letter, Alex Spiro wrote.

In response to the letter, Meta’s communications director, Andy Stone, stated on Threads that there are no engineers on the team who previously worked at Twitter.

It’s unclear what evidence Twitter has that former workers who now work at Meta have access to Twitter intellectual property or trade secrets.

Threads, a text-based conversation app intended, was launched on Wednesday by Meta to rival Twitter.

The social media platform garnered 30m sign-ups in less than 24 hours after launching, making it the most rapidly downloaded app ever.

Meta’s CEO said Threads was Meta’s attempt at taking a shot at building a “public conversations app with 1bn+ people” – an opportunity that Twitter had but “hasn’t nailed”

News agencies