• Twitter has accused Meta of hiring ex-employees who may still have access to Twitter’s systems.
• Meta is ordered to stop using any of Twitter’s trade secrets.
• “No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee,” Meta said in response.

As it turns out, if you start cutting off features of your social media platform and sticking them behind a paywall in an increasingly hostile environment, people will just leave. Twitter is learning this the hard way as Threads, an Instagram app surges forward in user growth.

Much like Facebook did to MySpace, Threads is here to offer social media fiends something new but similar to the endless scrolling apps they already know and love. While far from perfect, many users are relishing the opportunity to watch Elon Musk’s $44 billion investment sink.

However, the ship isn’t going down without a fight and Semafor has revealed that Alex Spiro working on behalf of Twitter sent Meta a letter with a rather bizarre accusation – that Meta hired engineers who used to work at Twitter.

“Over the past year, Meta has hired dozens of former Twitter employees. Twitter knows that these employees previously worked at Twitter; that these employees had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information; that these employees own ongoing obligations to Twitter; and that many of these employees have improperly retained Twitter documents and electronic devices,” wrote Spiro.

The lawyer continues by alleging that Meta assigned these employees to develop Threads. Meta is also instructed to immediately stop using any Twitter trade secrets as well as preserve documents related to the hiring of former Twitter employees.

In response to these allegations, director of communications at Meta, Andy Stone told Semafor, “No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee – that’s just not a thing.”

While employees could share secrets about places they used to work, that’s sort of the risk you take when you fire half of your work force days after a new owner takes over. Of course companies can make employees sign a restraint of trade agreements but if these are seen as unreasonable by a court, they are tough to enforce.

The real trouble however, is that Threads, an Instagram app, is tracking well with users. After signing up those who had a following on Instagram could simply import their follows and within hours celebrities, brands and even ordinary users had amassed followings that take months or even years to build on new platforms. Unfortunately, Threads seemingly makes use of the same tech Instagram uses for its timeline with no choice to see Threads from those you follow, you just get a stream of everything from everybody.

Rather than reflecting on the mistakes that had 30 million sign up for a new Meta product – a company that admitted it didn’t do enough to stop a genocide we’ll remind you – Elon Musk is claiming Meta cheated and berating Stephen King. Unfortunately, that’s not going to bring users back and all Threads needs to do right now is focus on incremental improvements and updates to keep users coming back.

So far 30 million people have signed up for Threads according to the BBC.

If change doesn’t come to Twitter, Musk will become this generation’s Tom. A figure we were all forced to see and eventually forgot about.