United States: Twitter claims in a legal lawsuit that parts of its source code have been leaked online. Following its unauthorised posting online earlier this month, Twitter ordered GitHub, an online software development platform, to take down the code, according to a legal document filed in the US state of California.
According to a document filed with the US District Court of the Northern District of California, GitHub complied with Twitter’s request to remove the code after the social media platform on March 24 issued a subpoena to identify a user known as “FreeSpeechEnthusiast”. The postings violate the platform’s intellectual property rights, according to San Francisco-based Twitter, who made this observation in their complaint.
The latest setback for the social media conglomerate since Mr. Elon Musk bought it is the code leak. During his tenure, the company has experienced mass layoffs, outages, significant changes to content moderation, and acrimonious debates about how to strike the right balance between free speech and online safety.
Mr. Musk recently announced that Twitter would publish the source code used to recommend tweets on March 31. Mr. Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion. The platform’s algorithm, as per Mr. Musk, who also leads Tesla and a number of other businesses, is excessively complex, and he anticipated that once the code was made available, people will discover “many silly things.” It’s unclear whether the leaked source has anything to do with the code that suggests tweets.
“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,” Mr. Musk remarked.