Twitter has accused Meta of stealing trade secrets to develop its new app Threads and is threatening legal action.

In a letter shared by news platform Semafor, Twitter attorney Alex Spiro told Meta founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg that the company has serious concerns that the social media giant has engaged in “systematic, wilful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property”.

Spiro wrote that Meta had hired dozens of former Twitter employees who continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information.

"Twitter intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights, and demands that Meta take immediate steps to stop using any Twitter trade secrets or other highly confidential information," said the letter. "Twitter reserves all rights, including, not limited to, the right to seek both civil remedies and injunctive relief without further notice to prevent any further retention,, disclosure, or use of its intellectual property by Meta."

A day after the letter was sent, in a Tweet Elon Musk said: “Competition is fine, cheating is not.”

However, according to the BBC, Meta has denied the claims outlined in the letter.

The Play Store listing describes Threads, which has accumulated 30 million users in just three days, as a place where communities come together to discuss everything from the "topics you care about today to what’ll be trending tomorrow".

Users can sign into Threads through Instagram, with users able to post ‘threads’ and have other users respond to them on an interface similar in style to Twitter.

When asked whether Threads will become bigger than Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg, who already has two million followers on the platform, said: “It'll take some time, but I think there should be a public conversations app with 1 billion+ people on it. Twitter has had the opportunity to do this but hasn't nailed it. Hopefully we will.”

The news follows Twitter chief executive Elon Musk imposing limits on the amount of posts users could read per day.

Musk subsequently said this was a "temporary measure" to address extreme levels of data scraping on the site.

"Almost every company doing AI, from start-ups to some of the biggest corporations on Earth, was scraping vast amounts of data,” Musk said.

The measure dismayed Twitter users while Musk recently announced it would be restricting use of its previously free dashboard tool Tweetdeck in 30 days.

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