Twitter accuses Meta of using its trade secrets for its new app Threads

Twitter CEO Elon Musk is threatening to sue tech giant Meta claiming the company has violated Twitter’s intellectual property rights, in particular, using Twitter’s trade secrets for its new app.

Threads is the new social network launched by Meta, a text-based conversation app that aims to compete against Twitter. The launch of Threads comes at a time of discontent among Twitter users after Elon Musk announced a cap on the number of tweets users can read per day.

Twitter's lawyer has sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg where the company expresses its “serious concerns that Meta Platforms has engaged in systematic, wilful and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property”. Twitter claims that Meta hired former Twitter employees who became involved in the development of Threads while they still had access to "Twitter trade secrets and other confidential information".

Elon Musk has expressed his opinion on Twitter, saying that "competition is fine, but cheating is not". A Meta spokesperson has commented on the issue on Threads, stating that no one on the Threads team is a former Twitter employee.

Twitter's accusation is not limited to Meta's alleged use of Twitter trade secrets, but also alleges that Meta has been web scraping Twitter to extract data that could help improve Threads. According to Twitter, Meta was “prohibited” from scraping data from any Twitter service. Indeed, limiting the number of tweets users can reed per day was a measure in response to companies using Twitter to train their AI models.