Twitter’s Circle Tweets Don’t Seem To Be Private Anymore, A Bug People Aren’t Happy About

Last year Twitter introduced a fun new way to tweet without having to start an alt account: Twitter Circle, which allows users to only tweet to accounts they deem trustworthy when it comes to posts you don’t want the world to see. But if you’ve been using it to air your darkest secrets, you might want to put the kibosh on that, at least for now.

As per TechCrunch, Twitter Circle addicts have been reporting a bug in which posts they meant only for an elite group were mysteriously winding up where they shouldn’t. Sometimes they pop up in the “For You” timeline of people who follow them but are not in one’s Circle. Other times they’re out there in the general public, for anyone to see.

Is this yet another Elon Musk-era bug? Something more nefarious? One former employee told Tech Crunch a theory on what was up:

“Twitter seems to be outright failing to filter out private content before serving it to users,” Theo Browne, a creator and former Twitch engineer, told <em>TechCrunch</em>. Twitter recently revealed the source code behind its recommendation algorithm, which uses multiple models to source, rank and filter tweets. Browne hypothesized that the sourcing model is surfacing private content, but these private tweets are not adequately being filtered out.

Of course, it’s hard for anyone to confirm what’s going on since Musk canned Twitter’s public relations team, like he did the janitors at Twitter HQ. But a number of people have tested out the problem, with unhappy results:

Upon finding out that Twitter Circle posts were materializing outside their Circle, people were not pleased.

Perhaps Musk and his team will eventually get around to fixing this problem, as they have with other Twitter hiccups. In the meantime, maybe don’t overshare or make fun of that mutual friend in a forum that’s supposed to be only semi-public.

(Via TechCrunch)