Twitter sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg this week threatening legal action for what the company suggested amounted to theft of protected intellectual property and trade secrets by Threads.

The letter comes as Zuckerberg claimed on Thursday that Threads, which runs on a .net domain, had signed up 30 million users in its first 24 hours since being released. Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, launched Threads Wednesday night.

“Competition is fine, cheating is not,” Musk wrote in a tweet replying to the news of the letter that Musk attorney Alex Spiro sent to Zuckerberg.

Competition is fine, cheating is not

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 6, 2023

Spiro said that the company “has serious concerns that Meta Platforms (‘Meta’) has engaged in systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property.”

“Over the past year, Meta has hired dozens of former Twitter employees,” the letter continued. “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 owe ongoing obligations to Twitter; and that many of these employees have improperly retained Twitter documents and electronic devices.”

“With that knowledge, Meta deliberately assigned these employees to develop, in a matter of months, Meta’s copycat ‘Threads’ app with the specific intent that they use Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property in order to accelerate the development of Meta’s competing app, in violation of both state and federal law as well as those employees’ ongoing obligations to Twitter,” the letter continued.

Twitter said that it “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.”

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The letter warned that Twitter would seek “both civil remedies and injunctive relief without further notice to prevent any further retention, disclosure, or use of its intellectual property by Meta.”

Twitter also informed Meta that it was prohibited from “engaging in any crawling or scraping of Twitter’s followers or following data” as laid out by the company’s terms of service.

“Please consider this letter a formal notice that Meta must preserve any documents that could be relevant to a dispute between Twitter, Meta, and/or former Twitter employees who now work for Meta,” the letter continued. “That includes, but is not limited to, all documents related to the recruitment, hiring, and onboarding of these former Twitter employees, the development of Meta’s competing Threads app, and any communications between these former Twitter employees and any agent, representative, or employee or Meta.”

A Texas school district has banned trans-identifying students from using the bathroom of the opposite sex and prohibited school staff from promoting preferred pronouns.

The school board for the Keller Independent School District just north of Fort Worth passed the policies on June 28 in a 5-0 vote. One school board member abstained, and another member was not present.

One of the policies states that district employees “shall not promote, encourage, or require the use of pronouns that are inconsistent with a student’s or other person’s biological sex.”

Another new policy requires students to use the bathroom and locker room that “corresponds to their gender assigned at birth.” However, schools may allow students to use a single-stall restroom.

The new policies “lay the groundwork for protecting kids and educators. I also think they basically help us get off to a good start for the upcoming school year,” said Charles Randklev, the Keller school board president.

The Keller school district enrolls about 34,000 students.

Members of Citizens Defending Freedom, True Texas Project, and other community members campaigned for the school policies.

“The Keller ISD School Board made the right decisions regarding bathroom and pronoun usage, and Citizens Defending Freedom is proud to have been part of the fight for sanity in one local school district,” said Kenya Alu, executive director for Citizens Defending Freedom of Tarrant County.

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“We hope to see school board trustees across Texas and Nationally, do the right thing for children and focus on teaching the basics rather than pushing a political agenda,” Alu said.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Texas was quick to condemn the new policies, calling them “discriminatory” and claiming they will harm LGBT students.

“These political attacks against kids are cruel and unlawful — and they create a hostile school climate for all,” the ACLU of Texas said in a tweet.

Parents and other community members packed into the June 28 school board meeting.

Some parents thanked the school board for voting to represent their values and said the bathroom rule is necessary to protect students’ safety and privacy. They also said the pronoun policy would not prevent anyone from using a student’s preferred pronoun — it simply will not force staff or students to use it.

The audience cheered some of the speakers who spoke during the public comment period of the meeting.

Several North Texas school districts including Keller recently elected conservative candidates to their school boards who have successfully pushed conservative policies.

Both Keller and the Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District, just east of Keller, elected multiple conservative candidates who were backed by the 1776 Project, a political action committee that works to elect conservative school board members.

The Grapevine-Colleyville school district passed similar policies on trans-identifying students last year.

Transgender bathroom usage and mandatory pronoun usage, as well as other issues like biological males in girls’ sports and parental notification for gender identity changes, have become hot button issues in school districts across the country over the last few years.

Meanwhile, it is more popular than ever for youth to adopt new gender identities. An estimated 300,000 minors aged 13 to 17 identified as transgender as of last year.