A new shock.. The “source code” for “Twitter” was leaked online

Portions of the “source code” used to power Twitter have been leaked online, according to US District Court filings for the Northern District, marking the latest hurdle facing the social networking site since the company was acquired by Elon Musk in a $44 billion deal late last year.

Twitter issued a subpoena on March 24 to software collaboration platform GitHub, in which a user identified as a “freelancer” shared snippets of Twitter’s source code without permission, according to the files. Twitter’s attorney said in the documents that the purpose of the subpoena was to identify the person responsible for sharing the code.

The documents have been filed with the US District Court for the Northern District of California, according to CNBC.
In turn, GitHub complied with Twitter’s request and removed the code on the same day. A GitHub spokesperson said the company publicly shares all DMCA takedowns, which occur when content is removed from a website at the copyright holder’s request, for the sake of transparency.

Musk has previously claimed that Twitter will open the source code used to recommend tweets on March 31. He said he expected people to find the problems “ridiculous” and that providing code transparency would be “very awkward” at first.

According to a DMCA request shared by GitHub, the company has removed “Twitter’s proprietary source code and internal tools.” It is not clear if the source code used to recommend the tweets was part of the leak.

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!

We’re developing a simplified approach to serve more compelling tweets, but it’s still a work in progress. That’ll also…

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 17, 2023