Twitter is threatening to sue Facebook's parent company Meta over its newly-launched rival app Threads, says a report by news website Semafor.
In a letter, a Twitter lawyer accused Meta of using confidential information and internal knowledge of the short message service for Threads, Semafor wrote on Thursday, publishing a copy of the letter.
Twitter lawyer Alex Spiro claimed in the letter that Meta had hired dozens of ex-employees of the short message service who were privy to confidential internal information.
Twitter owner and tech billionaire Elon Musk had laid off thousands of employees since his takeover of the service last October. Many of them subsequently found new jobs at other tech companies.
Meta has denied the allegations, Semafor said. There were no former Twitter employees working in the Threads development team, the firm reportedly said.
Meta released its Twitter competitor app on Wednesday night.
Threads' link with Instagram is seen as a significant boost for Meta's upstart competitor since it can draw on more than 1 billion current Instagram users.
The app raked in over 10 million users in the first few hours after being launched, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg announced earlier.
