Part of Twitter source code leaked on GitHub

Part of Twitter’s source code has been leaked and posted on GitHub by an unknown user. GitHub took down the post after the social media platform requested it to do so on Friday.

Twitter has also filed a case in the US District Court for the Northern District of California seeking to order GitHub to identify the person who shared the code and any other individuals who downloaded it, according to The New York Times. The code could have been on Github for several months, according to The New York Times report.

The Twitter court filing further said that a user by the name “FreeSpeechEnthusiast” posted the code on GitHub, which is an infringement of its intellectual property rights, according to the NYTimes report. The leaked source code is said to contain security vulnerabilities that could allow attackers to extract user data or take down the site. 

Internal investigations have begun and employees familiar with the matter say the person responsible for the leak left the company last year, according to sources cited by the publication. Since last year, about 75% of employees, or 7,500 employees have either been laid off or resigned from the company.

Tweet recommendation code to be made public 

Twitter will open source all code used to recommend tweets on March 31st, Billionaire Elon Musk, who is also the CEO of Twitter, said on March 18.

“Our algorithm is overly complex & not fully understood internally. People will discover many silly things, but we’ll patch issues as soon as they’re found,” Musk said in his chain of Tweets adding that a simplified approach to serving more compelling tweets is being developed and that’ll also be open source.

“Providing code transparency will be incredibly embarrassing at first, but it should lead to rapid improvement in recommendation quality. Most importantly, we hope to earn your trust,” Musk added. It is currently not clear if the leaked code contained the recommending code as well. 

Series of problems with Twitter

Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in October. Since then, the company has been facing several problems, which include mass layoffs, outages, changes to content moderation, and debates over creating a balance between free speech and online safety.

A large number of outages has made advertisers skeptical about posting their ads on the platform. On Friday, Musk also sent an email to employees saying that Twitter was worth about $20 billion, less than half of what he bought the company for. 

To avoid bankruptcy and streamline operations, the company will undergo radical changes including mass layoffs and cost cutting, Musk said in his mail. From April 1, the company will also be charging users $7 per month for getting blue tick verification.