Twitter’s legal team sent Meta a cease-and-desist letter over its new “Twitter-killer” text-based application named Threads.
Elon Musk’s Twitter accuses Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta of poaching former employees of Twitter to create a copycat app.
The letter accuses the company of a “systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property.”
Meta’s spokesperson responded with a denial.
“No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing,” he said.
Threads has been seen as a top rival to Twitter, which has been in turmoil since Musk purchased the company.
Elon Musk cut roughly 75% of its 7,500-person workforce not long after he acquired the company last year.
On July 1, Musk announced a limit to the number of tweets people would be allowed to view each day.
The Instagram parent company introduced Threads on Wednesday, and by Thursday morning Zuckerberg said on Threads that the app already had 30 million sign-ups.
Zuck later added, “It’ll take some time, but I think there should be a public conversations app with 1 billion+ people on it. Twitter has had the opportunity to do this but hasn’t nailed it. Hopefully we will.”