Washington, July 7 : Twitter has sent a letter to its rival Meta (banned in Russia as an extremist organization) threatening to sue over the latter’s new social media platform Threads for luring former Twitter employees to create a copycat application, Semafor reported.

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, the report quoted the letter as saying on Thursday.

Twitter reserves all rights, including, but not limited to, the right to seek both civil remedies and injunctive relief without further notice to prevent any retention, disclosure, or use of its intellectual property by Meta, the report said.

Twitter accused Meta of hiring dozens of former Twitter employees in possession of trade secrets and other sensitive information, the report said.

In addition, Twitter is alleging that Meta tasked the former employees with using Twitter’s trade secrets to accelerate the development of Threads, the report said.

The letter also implies that the employees in question violated their non-disclosure agreements with Twitter after joining Meta, the report added.

Earlier on Thursday, Twitter CEO Elon Musk tweeted: “Competition is fine, cheating is not.”

Threads, a text-based companion to Instagram that has a similar layout to Twitter, was launched on July 5 and has been reported to have accrued more than 30 million participants.