According to court documents, portions of Twitter's computer code were leaked online, presenting the latest challenge for the social media platform since its tumultuous $44 billion acquisition by Elon Musk late last year. The documents reveal that on March 24, Twitter issued a subpoena to GitHub, the software collaboration platform, after a user identified as "FreeSpeechEnthusiast" shared segments of Twitter's source code without authorization. Twitter's legal team seeks to identify the person responsible for communicating the code, per the court filings filed with the US District Court for the Northern District of California. GitHub has responded to Twitter's request by promptly removing the code, as confirmed by a company spokesperson to CNBC, adding that all DMCA takedowns are publicly shared to ensure transparency. Requests for comment from Twitter have yet to receive a response. In the past, Musk announced that on March 31, Twitter would make public the code utilized for recommending tweets. He anticipated that people would find "silly" problems, and the initial code transparency would be "incredibly embarrassing."
GitHub's DMCA request indicated that the company removed "proprietary source code for Twitter's platform and internal tools." However, it is uncertain whether the source code utilized for tweet recommendations was included in the leak.