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Twitter users are seeing their old tweets resurrected from the grave thanks to a new bug that is plaguing the social media platform.
According to reports from Twitter users, deleted tweets are reappearing in droves, with one cyber expert saying that they had 34,000 tweets restored.
“Last November, I deleted all my tweets. Every single one. I then ran Redact and deleted all my likes, my media and retweets,” said former chairman of internet security organisation SmoothWall, Richard “Dick” Morrell.
“38k tweets gone. Woke up today to find 34k of them restored by Twitter who presumably brought a server farm back up.”
Morrell was not alone, stating that over 400 people had revealed that they had been similarly affected, and he said that in just his circle, he estimates over a million tweets have been restored.
The Twitter bug raises a greater concern than just annoyance. When a user deletes a tweet, that person is hiding that data from the platform, making it inaccessible.
With the tweets reappearing, the new incident could very well be classed as a data breach, as it meets the definition of one as set by the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), being “a security incident that negatively impacts the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of personal data”.
As Morrell pointed out, Twitter said that once a tweet is deleted, “the tweet contents, associated metadata, and all analytical information about that tweet is no longer publicly available on Twitter,” or in other words, are all but deleted completely.
While data retention is not illegal, the incident, which Morrell and other experts believe is a result of the social media platform restoring an old server on cold storage, demonstrates that Twitter failed to meet appropriate data security standards.
“This shows Twitter has no handle at all on data privacy globally. It is in breach of GDPR on a global scale without a defense,” added Morrell.
Twitter has faced a number of security incidents of late, with the emails and other data of 200 million users being leaked back in January. Prior to that, the details of 5.4 million of its users were being shopped around late last year.
In light of this and the new leadership since SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk bought the platform, users are mass migrating away from the blue bird.
According to the Pew Research Center, 60 per cent of US Twitter users took breaks from the platform from the past year, while a quarter of everyone it surveyed said it was likely that they would not be using Twitter in a year from now.
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