Twitter source code leaked on GitHub, company subpoenas for leaker's identity

Twitter confirmed through court filings made public in late March 2023 that portions of its proprietary source code and internal tooling had been posted on GitHub by an account using the handle FreeSpeechEnthusiast.

On 24 March the company sent GitHub a takedown notice under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and the Microsoft owned platform removed the repository the same day. The FreeSpeechEnthusiast account remained active but no longer had any public repositories. Twitter also applied to the US District Court for the Northern District of California for a subpoena compelling GitHub to hand over identifying details for the poster and for anyone who had downloaded or forked the code, including names, addresses, telephone numbers, email addresses, IP addresses and access logs.

The account's first activity on GitHub dated to 3 January 2023, and BleepingComputer reported the material appeared to have been publicly available for at least several months before it was noticed. The New York Times, which first reported the filing, said an internal investigation at Twitter suggested the people responsible for the leak left the company in 2022. No individual was publicly identified.

Neither Twitter nor GitHub said how much code was involved, or whether any of it overlapped with the recommendation algorithm that Elon Musk had said the company would publish at the end of March.