Riesman didn’t panic, but she didn’t want people to see her “spicy” pictures. “It was, ‘Oh my God, am I going to show my naked body in front of a load of people?'” she said. “I’ve done my rounds for people I thought wouldn’t mind, but the general public doesn’t need to see me in my birthday suit.”
Melissa Ingle, who was a senior data scientist at Twitter until CEO Elon Musk initiated a round of layoffs in November 2022, called the whole thing a “major privacy breach.” Ingle added, “Your circle is your trusted group of friends, and to see these posts outside of that group is a sign that the algorithm is missing basic functionality.”
For Riesman, the idea that the feature failed doesn’t exactly come as a surprise. “I gave up a long time ago on the idea that everything I put online would be private forever,” she said. “I prepared myself for moments like this in my head. And it didn’t faze me.” Riesman said in a Twitter post about the incident that “it was more of a public service announcement for people who really rely on Twitter circles, which are a semi-private space or at least a controlled public space.” Riesman said she has a lot of friends who are trans but not who are out about their gender in circles and who can relate to the mistake.
RELATED: THE FUNDING VERIFICATION PROBLEM and how it’s being fixed. An email to Twitter’s press department asking why the privacy breach that occurred received the now-traditional automatic response of a poop emoji in the area
Unfortunately, circle-splitting is part of the way of life online, said Ellen Walker, who studies internet storytelling and narrative-driven digital culture at the Royal College of Art in London. “As quickly as closed digital spaces can be built, they can be taken away in a flash, either through technological improvements, wider audience participation or, in the case of Twitter’s innovations, a serious flaw in the power of moderation,” she said.
The impact is significant. “It would be one thing if this feature were simply taken away and Twitter told its users, but for it to happen unexpectedly without warning feels like a betrayal,” Ingle said. “Unfortunately, under Elon Musk, this kind of thing is going to happen more and more often, thanks to the severe staff cuts and lack of expertise he’s implemented.” (Musk has laid off or furloughed well over half of the company’s total workforce since taking over in October 2022.)
Moussa also blames Musk’s leadership. “It seems like the constant attachment to everything they want you to be an algorithm has just fucked it up,” he said. “That’s kind of the bigger security problem around the world. If you keep an account locked, what guarantee do you have that it’s going to stay locked? It’s a breach. The trust is gone. No one can ever be sure that this shit isn’t going to blow up in their face again.”
As for Riesman, she seemed sanguine. “I think there’s a part of us that’s just waiting for it now,” she said. “All of us who are still stuck here [on Twitter] know that the place is falling apart.”
