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Twitter threatened to sue Meta for allegedly stealing the company’s trade secrets when creating the rival messaging app Threads, as the new platform attracted tens of millions of users within hours of its debut.
Meta unveiled Thread on Wednesday as a competitor to Elon Musk’s Twitter. More than 30 million people had signed up less than 24 hours after it went live, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Thursday, putting it on track to overtake OpenAI’s ChatGPT as the most quickly downloaded consumer app at launch.
Alex Spiro, Twitter’s attorney, accused Meta of engaging in “systematic, willful, and illegal misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property” in a letter to Zuckerberg dated Wednesday.
The letter alleged that Meta employed “dozens” of former Twitter employees with access to top-secret information about the platform, many of whom “improperly maintained Twitter documents and electronic devices”.
Twitter then alleged that Meta intentionally directed these employees to build leads, “in violation of both state and federal law.”
Twitter and Meta declined to comment. The message was first reported by Semaphore and confirmed by two people familiar with the matter.
Musk, the billionaire Tesla founder who bought Twitter for $44 billion in October, replied to a Twitter user who broke the news: “Competition is good, cheating is not.”
On Threads, Meta Communications Director Andy Stone highlighted a quote in Semafor’s report, which was attributed to an anonymous Meta source and read: “No one on the Threads engineering team is an ex-Twitter employee — that’s nothing.”
Threads is a “text chat app” where users can post posts up to 500 characters long and include links, photos and videos. As with Twitter, posts can be replied to, liked, or shared by others. Some users have called the service a “Twitter killer”.
The app, which still lacks some Twitter functionality, links directly to Instagram, allowing users to navigate by their existing username and network. “This is as good a start as we had hoped!” Zuckerberg wrote on the app, describing it as a “friendly” alternative to Twitter.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT took five days to reach 1 million users. It holds the record as the fastest-growing consumer app of all time after reaching 100 million monthly active users in two months, according to UBS analysts. The pace of thread growth indicates that it will reach this limit in a matter of days.
The threads made a splash as Musk alienated some users and advertisers with his decision to reduce moderation in the platform and force disturbing changes to the product and its policies with little warning or explanation.
Over the weekend, for example, Musk drew criticism from some Twitter users when he introduced temporary limits on the number of posts users could see, in what he said was an attempt to “address extreme levels of data mining (and) system manipulation”.
Musk also culled about 80 percent of Twitter’s workforce and ordered drastic cost-cutting measures in order to bring the company back from the brink of bankruptcy.
In the letter, Twitter said it was asking Meta to “take immediate steps to stop using any Twitter trade secrets and other top-secret information,” while reserving the right to seek “civil and injunctive relief.” Meta also warned that it is “expressly prohibited from engaging in any crawling or scraping of Twitter followers or following data”.
