In a letter sent on Wednesday, Twitter alleged that Meta used its trade secrets to develop its new social media platform, Threads, and demanded that it stop using the information. Twitter said that Meta had hired dozens of former Twitter employees, many of whom "improperly retained" devices and documents from the company, and said Meta "deliberately" assigned them to work on Threads. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a Threads post on Thursday that no one on the site's engineering team is a former Twitter employee. Legal experts said that while many companies have accused competitors that hired former employees and have a similar product of stealing trade secrets, the cases are difficult to prove. One element courts look at is whether a company made clear to employees that the specific information at issue was a trade secret.

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Persons: Meta, Twitter, Andy Stone, Polk Wagner, Wagner, Elon Musk, Sharon Sandeen, Sandeen, Uber, Jody Godoy, Noeleen Walder, Matthew Lewis Organizations: Twitter, University of Pennsylvania, Mitchell Hamline School of Law, Companies, Uber Technologies, Thomson Locations: St, Paul , Minnesota, Alphabet's, New York