Twitter seems to be having some serious issues today with users seeing tweets from people that they are not following and in some cases being able to read tweets from people who have protected their Twitter accounts.
When you protect your Twitter account, your tweets are meant to be invisible to everyone but those who follow you. But today it seems Twitter users have been seeing random tweets from strangers among updates from their friends and contacts.
Writer Zoe Margolis (aka Girl With The One Track Mind) reported the issue early this morning: “Dozens of people I do not follow are appearing in my stream. WTF is up, Twitter?” She subsequently confirmed that the tweets were not as a result of Twitter‘s new reweet function.
We did a little digging at search.twitter.com and found scores of people complaining of the same problem with some suggesting they are seeing tweets from users who have protected their tweets. Cate Sevilla of Bitchbuzz said: “I’m glad I’m getting random people’s protected tweets in my feed. Privacy FTW.”
Other users have reported their feeds being swamped by tweets in other languages and receiving tweets from people they have not followed as texts on their mobiles. However, the problem does not seem to be affecting people using third-party apps like Tweetdeck.
Has your Twitter feed been flooded with tweets from strangers? Have your protected tweets been revealed to the world? Let us know.
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