Twitter sends cease-and-desist letter to Meta in anticipation of Threads lawsuit

July 6 (UPI) -- Elon Musk's Twitter has sent a cease-and-desist letter to Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, in anticipation of a lawsuit over the launch of Instagram's new Threads application.

Threads, a microblogging platform similar to Twitter, was launched Wednesday and reached more than 30 million registered users in the first 24 hours with people frustrated with Musk's decision-making and controversial tweets.

"Twitter has serious concerns that Meta Platforms has engaged in systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter's trade secrets and other intellectual property," Musk lawyer Alex Spiro claimed in the letter, obtained by Dexerto.

It was not immediately clear what copyrighted material Twitter claims Meta employed. Spiro claimed Meta has hired dozens of former Twitter employees after Musk unceremoniously chopped thousands from the payrolls after taking over the platform last year. Twitter sent a poop emoji when reached by UPI for comment.

Andy Stone, Meta's communications director, said the company has not hired any ex-Twitter employees for its Threads platform.

"No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee," Stone said in a statement on Threads. "That's just not a thing."

Nevertheless, Spiro said Meta employees had "improperly retained" Twitter documents and created a "copycat" of the social network "in a matter of months."

"Twitter intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights," Spiro said.

Meta has been ordered to preserve any documents relevant to the dispute with Twitter in anticipation of a potential lawsuit.

Threads was released just says after Musk said Saturday that his company would impose "temporary" limits on the number of tweets accounts can read. He has also prevented tweets from being read without logging in to an account.

Musk said the limitations were put into place "to address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation" which Spiro accused Meta of engaging in with his letter.

Verified accounts on Twitter were limited to reading 6,000 posts per day while unverified accounts are limited to reading 600 posts per day and new accounts that are created and unverified will be limited to reading 300 posts per day.

Musk later added that the rate limits would soon increase to 8,000 for verified users, 800 for unverified and 400 for new unverified, the rates that remain in effect. It was not immediately clear how long Musk intends for those limits to remain in place.