Don’t count on your Twitter Circle tweets being limited to a tight-knit group, at least for now. users have discovered a bug that exposes at least some private Circle posts to outsiders. They frequently appear in followers’ For You recommendations, but some say the content is reaching complete strangers. As you can imagine, that could be problematic if you’re discussing a sensitive topic or want to minimize potential harassment.
Twitter is not available for comment as it has disbanded its public relations team. Creator Theo Brown says TechCrunch Twitter may not filter Circle tweets from its recommendation system before they are shared with other users.
Circles have had glitches for months, but glitches have not been known to share tweets with people outside of a circle. Sometimes they haven’t included the label indicating their Circle-exclusive status, even if it was clear they couldn’t be shared anywhere else. This is considerably worse: now you can’t trust a private post to stay that way.
Twitter has dealt with a growing number of technical problems since Elon Musk bought the company and laid off many employees. There have been multiple outages, problematic API changes, and confusion over feature implementation and removals. While these setbacks don’t necessarily lead to an exodus of users, they don’t help at a time when the social media giant is reportedly struggling to keep advertisers and turn a profit.
