Twitter Sends Meta Cease-and-Desist Letter Over Threads App

Twitter sent Meta a cease-and-desist letter over the newly launched Threads app. The letter claims that Meta hired former Twitter employees to build the product.

Twitter is threatening to take legal action against Meta over the new Threads app. The information comes from a cease-and-desist letter the social media giant sent Meta on July 6. Twitter’s basis for legal action relates to trade secrets.

The letter, written by Alex Spiro, claims that Twitter has serious concerns about a “systematic, willful and unlawful misappropriation” of its trade secrets and intellectual property. It also claims that the app has scraped Twitter’s data.

Elon Musk has also commented on the development, tweeting that “competition is fine, cheating is not.”

Spiro also wrote in the letter that Meta had hired dozens of former Twitter employees, who had and continue to have access to trade secrets and highly confidential information.

Meta’s communications director Andy Stone explained on Threads have also highlighted the fact that the Threads engineering team does not have a former Twitter employee.

Threads and Instagram Inextricably Linked

One point of contention with the Threads app is the fact that if users were to delete their Threads profile. They would also lose their Instagram account. This is because the two are inextricably tied. However, users can delete individual posts.

The app shows that users must delete their Instagram account to delete their Threads profile and data. It also explains why Threads is currently unavailable in Europe, as European Union regulations require apps to have separate infrastructure. Still, Meta’s stock has surged following the launch of Threads.

The difficulty of Twitter’s battle with Meta is compounded by the fact that another rival, Jack Dorsey’s Bluesky, has also been making progress. The latter announced an $8 million seed round and its first paid service in a blog post published on July 5.

The post, titled “Our Plan for a Sustainably Open Social Network,” talks about its long-term mission. The $8 million round was led by NEO, with other investors, including Kubernetes co-creator Joe Beda.

The funding will be used for team expansion, operations and infrastructure costs, and growing the AT Protocol ecosystem and Bluesky app.

As for its monetization plans, Bluesky has disclosed that it will forgo the popular advertising model. Instead, the company will introduce custom domains as its first paid service. It has partnered with Namecheap to offer easy domain purchasing and management.