Your Twitter Circle is your inner sanctum: while your regular tweets may be suitable for public consumption, your private thoughts are only for your confidants. So if your Twitter Circle tweets are seen by someone outside your Circle, that would be bad and a violation of the Twitter Circle trust circle. Maybe you can see where this is going.
As TechCrunch reports, “many Twitter users” are seeing their private Twitter Circle tweets appear in other people’s For You mentions. TechCrunch spoke with several users who witnessed the bug and often reported that their Twitter Circle tweets were appearing in front of followers who were not part of the Circle. In some cases, however, these tweets appear in the feeds of users who don’t follow the publisher at all.
Twitter user Ian Coldwater, for example, wanted to test these reports for himself. They created a Twitter circle with a user in it and then tweeted to that circle “Like this if you can see it”. If the feature worked as advertised, the only person who should be able to like the tweet (and therefore see it) would be the person Coldwater added to the Circle. However, three people ended up liking the tweet, two of whom Coldwater didn’t even follow in the first place. Other users replied to Coldwater in the thread, confirming that the message they saw in their feeds was not marked as a Twitter Circle tweet.
It’s unclear how widespread this problem is or how much risk there is of your Twitter Circle tweets appearing in the wrong feed. However, it is clear that there are issues with the feature and that sensitive or private ideas cannot be trusted.
If you are using Twitter Circles primarily as a casual way to express your ideas to a specific group of people, then the risk may not be an issue. If the “wrong” person sees your idea on your favorite TV show, that’s not particularly compromising. However, if your Twitter circle is your way of venting about your work, finding new experiences without alerting your employer, sharing difficult private situations in your life, or sharing any other sensitive information with trusted accounts, this is your caveat to stop.
This is another example of a major feature of Twitter that no longer works properly. For all the drama surrounding the company’s current situation, it’s clear that they no longer have the resources to reliably maintain operations. After all, Instagram’s Close Friends is still working, and Snapchat’s Private Story is still working; however, Twitter Circles is not.
