Twitter’s Source Code Leak Adds to Elon Musk’s Social Media Mess
Some of Twitter‘s source code has reportedly been leaked online. According to a legal filing in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, a user identified as “FreeSpeechEnthusiast” is accused of sharing parts of Twitter’s code on GitHub. Twitter is now seeking a court order to compel GitHub to reveal the poster’s identity and anyone who downloaded the code, alleging copyright infringement.
In reply, a GitHub spokesman confirmed in an emailed statement that the company complied with Twitter’s request to take down the code but declined further comment. Twitter did not respond to a request for comment. It should be noted that Twitter, under its new owner and CEO Elon Musk, no longer replies to any press requests.
Sources close to the situation claim that the code leak appears to have come from a former Twitter employee. Since Musk’s takeover, over five-thousand employees have been laid off, leaving fewer than 2,000 staffers.
This code release comes after a January zero-day API breach, which released 235 million unique Twitter user records. In addition, Twitter fouled up its own use of its API on March 6. This resulted in Twitter’s links, images, and videos all failing for a time. Musk responded: “This platform is so brittle (sigh).” Musk continued, the code “Will ultimately need a complete rewrite.”
On February 21, Musk claimed, “our algorithm is made open source next week.” He added it wouldn’t work well at first, “but it will improve rapidly!” He failed to keep his promise. Who will fix the code and open source it remains unanswered since Musk laid off most of Twitter’s developers.
The new leak adds to mounting problems for Musk as he tries to correct Twitter’s course through an aggressive mix of cost-cutting and policy changes. It also raises questions about the site’s security.
It’s difficult to know exactly how much trouble this code leak will cause since we’re not sure what was in it. We only know that Twitter claims it contains “Proprietary source code for Twitter’s platform and internal tools.” We also don’t know when the code was placed. If it was uploaded when FreeSpeechEnthusiast’s GitHub account was started on Jan. 3, 2023, the code was available for almost twelve weeks.
What happens next? Stay tuned, and, if you still have a Twitter account, keep an eye on it. There may be more trouble heading for it soon.
