Twitter Circle allows people to share their thoughts with a much smaller and more selected group on the platform. However, an incident caused the private tweets to be viewed by the public, and the company revealed that it was due to a security issue.
Twitter Admits the Leak
It took a while before Twitter confirmed that its Circle feature was momentarily faulty causing private tweets to be publicized, given that the incident took place back in April. The company informed the affected users of the issue saying it was caused by a "security incident."
The issue that resulted in the bug was said to have happened earlier this 2023. The social media platform claims that the issue was immediately fixed, as mentioned in Engadget, and issued an apology to the users that had their private tweets exposed.
The company stated that Twitter is committed to protecting the privacy of the people who use its service. They also stated that they understand the risks that the issue can introduce and that they "deeply regret" that it happened.
This is just another addition to the long list of issues that Twitter users have experienced since Elon Musk took over. Just recently, Twitter experienced an outage where users were logged out of their account on the web and they weren't able to log back in.
Some would argue that this was the result of the Twitter CEO cutting more than half of the company's workforce, and the remaining workers can no longer bear the workload that was meant for twice the number of Twitter's current number of staff.
Other than the technical issues that arose since the takeover, Musk has also implemented several new policies and features that haven't exactly been welcomed by Twitter users. Some of the new implementations even led to the loss of Twitter users and advertisers.
The Incident Back in April
Several users of the platform reported the bug that allows Twitter Circle tweets to be seen by users other than who it was intended for. The tweets appeared in the "For You" timeline for the platform, which was said to be generated by Twitter's algorithm.
While some are innocent tweets that wouldn't cause damage to the author, others might contain sensitive data that should be kept within a trusted circle. It could become dangerous when private information is exploited by people that follow the author.
Former Twitter engineer and content creator Theo Browne was among the users who experienced the glitch, as reported by Tech Crunch. He stated that the platform seems to be "outright failing to filter out private content before serving it to users."
Twitter Circle
Twitter Circle functions like Instagram's "close friends" feature, where your tweets can only be viewed by a select number of people that you chose yourself. You can only create one Twitter Circle, but be able to include up to 150 people in it.
Since it is, in a way, a private circle, the users included in your circle cannot Retweet your posts, even if your profile is public, although they can still take screenshots of the content. Only you can see the people you have included in your Circle.
