A cease-and-desist letter has been sent to Mark Zuckerberg by a lawyer acting for Twitter claiming new Meta app Threads is a \u201ccopycat\u201d of the Elon Musk-owned platform. The letter reportedly accused Zuckerberg of the \u201csystematic, wilful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter\u2019s trade secrets and other intellectual property\u201d. It is written by Alex Spiro, who says he is acting on behalf of Musk\u2019s X Corp and also accuses Meta of hiring \u201cdozens\u201d of former Twitter employees who \u201chave access to Twitter\u2019s trade secrets and other highly confidential information\u201d. In a tweet referencing the letter on Thursday evening, Musk said: \u201cCompetition is fine, cheating is not.\u201d Following the reports, Andy Stone, Meta\u2019s communications director, posted on Threads: \u201cTo be clear: No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee \u2014 that\u2019s just not a thing.\u201d Threads, created by Facebook and Instagram owners Meta, went live in the UK at midnight on Thursday. The platform\u2019s launch was brought forward by 15 hours and made freely available in 100 countries, although it is not yet available in the EU due to regulatory concerns. Linked to Instagram, it allows users to post up to 500 characters of text and up to five minutes of video and links, as well as pictures. Zuckerberg said on Thursday sign ups for the app have surpassed 30 million. Twitter chief executive Linda Yaccarino tweeted on Thursday after the roll out of Twitter\u2019s new competitor: \u201cOn Twitter, everyone\u2019s voice matters. \u201cWhether you\u2019re here to watch history unfold, discover REAL-TIME information all over the world, share your opinions, or learn about others \u2014 on Twitter YOU can be real. \u201cYOU built the Twitter community. And that\u2019s irreplaceable. This is your public square. \u201cWe\u2019re often imitated \u2014 but the Twitter community can never be duplicated.\u201d The launch of Threads comes against a backdrop of turbulence at Twitter after it imposed tweet viewing limits at the weekend in a move it partly blamed on data harvesting by companies building artificial intelligence models. Many users have publicly expressed frustrations with Twitter since Musk took over, partly linked to political views and erratic behaviour, as well as efforts to push more users towards its paid-for Twitter Blue service. The new app is the latest chapter in the rivalry between Zuckerberg and Musk, who bought Twitter in October. Last month, the pair \u2013 two of the world\u2019s most high-profile billionaires \u2013 agreed to take each other on in a cage fight in an exchange that went viral on social media.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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