Twitter acknowledges security incident that showed private tweets to random users

Back in April, several Twitter users were affected by a bug that showed private Twitter Circle tweets to random users in the For You tab. A month later, Twitter acknowledged the security incident and informed users in an email sent out on Friday that the bug has now been fixed.

Twitter fixes serious bug affecting Circle users

For those unfamiliar, Twitter Circle is a feature that works similarly to Instagram’s Close Friends, which lets you share posts with only the users you’ve chosen. As such, anyone can keep their account open to the public and still share tweets about their personal lives with their closest friends, for example.

But the bug that Twitter has now confirmed was causing these tweets to show up on the timeline of people who weren’t part of that Circle. Even worse, random users who didn’t even follow the affected accounts could see the tweets from private Circles.

“In April 2023, a security incident may have allowed users outside of your Twitter Circle to see tweets that should have otherwise been limited to the Circle to which you were posting,” says the email sent by Twitter. “This issue was identified by our security team and immediately fixed so that these tweets were no longer visible outside of your Circle,” the company adds.

According to Twitter, the company has conducted an investigation to understand how the incident happened. The platform claims to be “committed to protecting the privacy of the people who use our service, and we understand the risks that an incident like this can introduce and we deeply regret this happened.”

More about Twitter

In addition to the bug affecting Twitter Circles, some users have reported seeing tweets from private accounts or even subscriber-only content from accounts they don’t follow.

Earlier this year, Twitter made some changes to its For You tab, which is now showing many more tweets from accounts that users don’t follow. It’s also showing tweets from Elon Musk to people who don’t follow him. All these changes seem to have broken how Twitter works – or should work.

More recently, Twitter has removed blue checkmarks and limited the reach of accounts that don’t pay for Twitter Blue. The platform also no longer lets users use its search without being logged in. At the same time, the company has reversed its decision and will let some government services continue to use the Twitter API for free.

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