Twitter Inc. has threatened to take legal action against Meta Platforms, alleging that the new Threads app has made use of its intellectual property and trade secrets without permission.

This was revealed in a letter sent to Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, the parent company of Meta, by Alex Spiro, Twitter's lawyer. Threads, launched on Wednesday, has been seen as a direct competitor to Elon Musk's Twitter, taking advantage of Instagram's huge user base.

Spiro's letter indicates that Twitter is concerned that Meta has “systematically, willfully and unlawfully misappropriated” its trade secrets and other confidential information. He demands that Meta “take immediate steps to stop using any Twitter trade secrets or other highly confidential information”.

Spiro further accused Meta of hiring ex-Twitter personnel who had access to Twitter's trade secrets and other confidential information. However, a spokesperson for Meta, Andy Stone, has denied the allegation and stated that no one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee.

Similarly, a former senior Twitter employee has also stated that they were not aware of any ex-Twitter staff being part of the Threads development team.

Twitter and Musk have long been aware of the threat of competition from other social media platforms. In recent months, Mastodon and Bluesky have emerged as rivals to Twitter, and Threads' user interface bears a striking resemblance to the microblogging platform.

In response to news of the alleged misappropriation of intellectual property, Musk tweeted, “Competition is fine, cheating is not”. It remains to be seen whether this rift between Twitter and Meta will lead to legal action.

For now, it is clear that Twitter is taking a hard stance against what it perceives to be the unlawful misappropriation of its intellectual property.