Twitter Threatens To Sue Meta Over Similarities In Threads App

Just days after Meta launched its Threads app, a supposed rival to Twitter, Elon Musk’s team is threatening to sue Facebook’s parent company, alleging the technology firm has violated his platform’s “intellectual property rights.”

In a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, which was first reported by news outlet Semafor, an attorney for Musk revealed that the social media site has “serious concerns” that Meta engaged in “systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets.”

Through the lawsuit, it appears Twitter is intending to “strictly enforce its intellectual property rights,” demanding that Meta “take immediate steps” to stop using any of this “secret or highly-confidential information” to run Threads.

While Meta and Zuckerberg have yet to offer a formal comment on the matter, Semafor quoted a company source that claimed “no one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee,” which may help quash initial rumors.

It’s unsurprising that the spat between Musk and Zuckerberg, two technology giants, is seemingly boiling over. Just after Threads went live, Zuckerberg headed to Twitter for the first time in over a decade to share a textless post of a Spider-Man meme.

If anything, it doesn’t seem Meta’s denying the obvious similarities between the two social media sites, though it remains to be seen if Musk’s lawsuit will bear any fruit in its attempt to bring down an application hailed as the “Twitter Killer.”

[via The Guardian and Ars Technica, cover image via Rafael Henrique | Dreamstime.com]