Twitter News: People outside your Circle can see your supposedly private posts

Have you encountered tweets in recent weeks from a public user and are not able to share them? When you click on those tweets, do they just disappear? Well, you are not the only one experiencing this. Even more, it is not just about tweets disappearing for no reason: you are actually not supposed to see them. This is reportedly a work of a bug affecting Twitter Circle, causing private group posts to be shared even with people who are not supposed to view them.

Twitter Circle is designed to be a private space for a group of people curated by the user. Here, you are supposed to confidently share more personal posts, thoughts, and images with trusted friends. However, this is no longer the case in Twitter Circle as more users discover their Circle posts are also being suggested to others outside their Circles through Twitter’s For You timeline.

“I made a Twitter Circle with one person in it and posted this tweet for science,” a user named Ian Coldwater shared the experience. “This was the result. Two people I don’t follow saw the tweet & liked it. One of those people doesn’t follow me either. Twitter Circles aren’t private. Don’t post anything you want private in them.”

“DO NOT USE TWITTER CIRCLE,” warned another user. “This morning I saw a Twitter circle tweet of an account I do not follow and the account does not follow me either. I already checked with the person regarding the tweet. The person confirmed that I’m not in the circle.”

Recently, Twitter shared some of its source code, which includes the algorithm for recommending tweets. But it is hard to say that the problem is coming from it, especially now that Twitter still hasn’t confirmed anything about this issue, and contacting Twitter is a handful without its recently laid-off public relations team. Nonetheless, during the sharing of the code, Elon Musk already set the general expectation, saying the release “is going to be quite embarrassing, and people are going to find a lot of mistakes, but we’re going to fix them very quickly.”

Several users have already raised the matter on the platform and warned others about the current situation. Yet, without official confirmation from Twitter, the bug could put many oblivious users in bigger problems in the future, especially with many using the platform to share explicit and intimate content, from nudes and other statements that are not meant to be seen by the public.