Twitter Threatens to Sue Meta Over 'Copycat' App Threads

Twitter threatened to sue Meta, Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, over the newly-released Threads app. 

The Details: In a letter first reported by Semafor (Lean Left bias), an attorney for Twitter accused Meta of stealing trade secrets by hiring some of the 6,000+ Twitter employees fired after Elon Musk bought the company. The letter said Meta “deliberately” hired former Twitter employees who had “improperly retained Twitter documents and electronic devices.” Musk later tweeted, “Competition is fine, cheating is not.” However, a Meta spokesperson dismissed the accusation in a Threads post, saying, “No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing.”

How the Media Covered It: Most coverage across the spectrum continued to tie the apps together, calling Threads a “Twitter clone,” a “copycat,” or a “rival.” Some also noted concerns over Threads’ data collection. Some, including the writer of the initial Semafor article, took Twitter’s threat as a sign that Threads was a serious rival.