Who Leaked Twitter’s Source Code?

The uncaged bird is apparently singing. Photo: Jane Barlow/PA Images via Getty Images

Chief Twit Elon Musk recently said that the code for Twitter’s algorithm would be open-source, but someone else who had access to the company’s source code may have beaten the billionaire to the transparency punch. Twitter revealed in a court filing over the weekend that a GitHub user named “FreeSpeechEnthusiast” had posted the company’s proprietary source code on the platform, exposing the social network’s intellectual property for all the world’s hackers to see. The username may be a dig at Musk, who has repeatedly claimed that free speech will be Twitter’s new North Star, no matter the consequences.

The company had GitHub take the code down on Friday and asked a U.S. District Court in California to order GitHub to unmask the uploader, along with anyone who downloaded the code. As the Verge noted Monday, this was a major, potentially damaging security breach:

Proprietary source code is often among a company’s most closely held trade secrets. Making it public risks revealing its software’s vulnerabilities to would-be attackers, and can also give competitors an advantage by being able to see non-public internal workings. Source code has been a common target for hackers in the past, including in attacks on Microsoft, and the Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projekt Red.

The New York Times reports that the court filing is part of a manhunt by Twitter executives, who believe the likely culprit was one of the company’s disgruntled former employees. Since Musk took over Twitter, the company has laid off the vast majority of its workforce in a supposed effort to cut costs, including some of the “extremely hardcore” workers the company had kept around. That means there are literally thousands of possible suspects, and that Twitter’s efforts to prevent such sabotage — which included code freezes and locking employees out of company resources before even telling them they had been let go — didn’t work.

Though Twitter hasn’t collapsed, as many suspected it would, when forced to maintain the social network with a skeleton crew of developers, the site has nonetheless suffered a range of missteps and technical issues, including regular outages, since the Musk era began. The platform has also rolled out a number of changes to its service, including code changes intended to boost the reach of tweets from its new owner, who once vowed that the company’s new policy would be “freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach.”

This wasn’t the first time a major tech company has had its source code exposed, but it may be the first time that happened because someone hated their new former boss.