In an email to users, Twitter acknowledges a bug that showed some Circle tweets to users outside of the Circle in April 2023 and says the issue has been fixed
Filipe Espósito / 9to5Mac :
Context & Ripple Effects
Twitter's email admission closes a loop that opened when users spent days warning that Circle tweets were leaking into strangers' For You feeds before the company said anything publicly. The feature — released out of beta last August as a way to tweet to up to 150 chosen people — was pitched as the platform's answer to smaller-audience sharing, which makes an exposure bug a direct hit on its core promise.
It also fits a pattern in the coverage rather than standing alone: a month after [[a:1157223|February's widespread outages that left some users unable to tweet except by scheduling or API]], Twitter is again explaining a failure to its users, this time one involving private content rather than uptime.
First-order effects
- Users who posted to Circles in April now know their messages reached people they never approved, and Twitter's fix means those posts stop appearing outside the intended group going forward.
Second-order effects
- Trust in Circle as a venue for candid posting takes a measurable dent — the same dynamic that followed Twitter's 2018 disclosure of multi-year direct-message leaks to developers — pushing cautious users toward truly private channels instead of semi-private feed features.
Third-order effects
- If the cadence holds — a major outage in February, a privacy incident acknowledged in May — Twitter's recurring reliability and privacy failures risk structurally capping adoption of any intimacy-tiered sharing product on the platform.
The trend: Platforms layering smaller-audience sharing onto public feeds keep discovering that privacy-tier features fail differently from uptime features, with user reports arriving well before official acknowledgment.