The Twitter bugs keep on coming!
While Twitter has had all sorts of performance issues over the last few months since Elon Musk took over, the site has generally kept security incidents to a minimum. Well, except for the time that someone leaked part of the company’s source code on GitHub. Okay, the security issues have also been bad, and now there’s another one.
As spotted by users on the social media platform, it appears that tweets that are meant to be private with a user’s Circle group are currently able to be viewed by people outside of that group. Circles, which was introduced back in 2022, allows users to create private groups of followers and share tweets with them. It’s been a way for creators to share more intimate things with a smaller group of subscribers who may also pay for the privilege.
However, some users have reported a bug that exposes their Circle tweets to people who are not in their group. According to at least one example, a user not in a Circle was able to like a tweet that was only intended for the users included in the Circle.
Twitter has not yet acknowledged or fixed the bug, despite multiple complaints from users. Whatever the cause, the bug poses a serious threat to the privacy of users who use Circles for sensitive or personal topics.
The bug rears its head a couple of weeks after Elon Musk made good on his promise to open source part of Twitter’s recommendation algorithm. While the company hopefully deals with this latest bug, it did recently get a win when GitHub was ordered to give up the information of the user who leaked the company’s source code. Hopefully, Twitter will resolve the Circles bug soon — that could really mess with people’s trust in the platform. What’s left of it, anyway.
