Twitter has greeted the launch of the Meta Threads text application with a letter from its lawyer.

Elon Musk’s lawyer Alex Spiro sent a letter to the tech giant, which recently increased the structure of its business through the creation of Threads, in which he accused Meta of misappropriating trade secrets. According to him, the developers of the new platform are former Twitter employees who were instructed to copy the application for social networks. Also, the legal representative of Elon Musk warned the tech giant against deleting the personal information of Twitter users.

The lawyer stated that the company, whose interests he protects, intends to defend its intellectual property rights. He noted that in this case, both the practice of using civil remedies and the method of injunction without further notice can be applied.

The lawyer’s statement states the demands of the social network Elon Musk to the technology giant to take immediate measures to stop the use of trade secrets and other data belonging to the category of confidential information.

Mark Zuckerberg, the head of Meta, did not hide his intention to compete with Twitter when launching a new social network. But this is not proof of the justice of the accusations on the part of Alex Spiro. Competition can be characterized as a natural state of relations between companies operating in the same industry.

Meta Communications Director Andy Stone wrote in Threads that former employees of the company owned by Elon Musk did not participate in the creation of the new social network and called this impossible.

Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino did not accuse a competitor of copying, using the practice of direct statement of thought, but very clearly hinted that she suspected the tech giant of this, publishing a tweet in which she stated that firms often imitate. This is not an accusation of habitual understanding, but a very transparent hint.

Elon Musk, in the context of claims against Meta, stated that competition is a normal practice, but fraud goes beyond the bounds of legality.

Threads was launched last Wednesday, July 5. The new application is available to users in more than 100 countries, it can be downloaded in versions for iOS and Android.

The new virtual platform is a digital space in which you can publish text messages no longer than 500 characters, and post links, as well as photos and videos up to five minutes long. The app is not yet available in the EU due to data privacy concerns.

Mark Zuckerberg has set a goal to bring the number of users of the new social network to 1 billion people. He noted that Twitter had an opportunity to achieve this quantitative indicator, but the chance was missed.