On July 7, 2023, Twitter issued a threat to sue Meta, the parent company of Facebook, over its new Threads platform. Twitter’s attorney, Alex Spiro, delivered a message to Meta CEO, expressing concerns about the recruitment of former Twitter employees who may have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and highly confidential information.

Twitter intends to enforce its intellectual property rights and has demanded that Meta cease using any Twitter trade secrets or confidential information. However, according to Meta representative Andy Stone, none of the engineers working on Threads are former Twitter employees.

While competitors like Mastodon and Bluesky have emerged since Elon Musk took control of Twitter, Threads bears some resemblance to Twitter’s user interface. However, Threads does not support keyword searches or direct messaging.

At the time of reporting, Reuters had not received a prompt response from Alex Spiro regarding their request for comment.