Court filings reveal that fragments of Twitter’s source code were leaked online, posing a new challenge for the social media platform since the controversial $44 billion acquisition by Elon Musk in last year.
According to court filings, Twitter has issued a subpoena to GitHub, a software collaboration platform, after a user named “FreeSpeechEnthusiast” shared parts of Twitter’s source code without authorization. Twitter’s counsel stated in the filings that the purpose of the subpoena is to identify the individual responsible for the code’s dissemination.
In the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, court documents were filed regarding the partial leak of Twitter’s source code. GitHub, a software collaboration platform, received a subpoena from Twitter on March 24 after a user, identified as “FreeSpeechEnthusiast,” shared parts of Twitter’s source code without authorization. Twitter’s counsel requested the subpoena to identify the responsible party, according to the filings.
GitHub responded to Twitter’s request and removed the code on the same day, as confirmed by a spokesperson who stated that all DMCA takedowns are publicly shared to ensure transparency. DMCA takedowns are when content is taken down from a website upon the request of a copyright holder.
Requests for comment made to Twitter were not promptly addressed.
Earlier, Elon Musk had stated that Twitter would make the code utilized for suggesting tweets available as open source on March 31. He expressed his belief that people would discover trivial issues, and that the provision of code transparency would be initially “incredibly embarrassing.”
The DMCA request disclosed by GitHub indicated that the removed content included “proprietary source code for Twitter’s platform and internal tools.” It remains unclear whether the code used for recommending tweets was among the leaked material. Twitter has not yet commented on the matter.
