Vital Points
- Court documents state that parts of the computer code required to power Twitter were posted online.
- On March 24, Twitter filed a subpoena on the website GitHub, after discovering that a user going by the name "FreeSpeechEnthusiast" had posted unauthorised portions of Twitter's source code there.
- Twitter made a request, and GitHub agreed by removing the code.
According to court documents, portions of the computer code that runs Twitter were stolen online, posing the biggest challenge for the social media site since Elon Musk's turbulent $44 billion purchase of the business late last year.
The filings state that on March 24, Twitter issued a subpoena on the GitHub platform after learning that a user going by the name of "FreeSpeechEnthusiast" had posted unapproved sections of Twitter's source code there. The subpoena is intended to identify the person who disseminated the code, according to Twitter's legal counsel.
- The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California received the paperwork.
The company informed CNBC that GitHub replied to Twitter's request the same day and erased the code. In the spirit of transparency, according to a company representative, the company discloses all DMCA takedowns, which occur when content is removed from a website at the request of a copyright holder.
- Twitter has not yet quickly responded to requests for comment.
Musk has previously said that on March 31 Twitter would make the code used to suggest tweets publicly available. He said that he anticipates that people would discover "silly" problems and that first disclosing the source code will be "very humiliating."
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The business reportedly deleted "proprietary source code for Twitter's platform and internal technologies," according to the DMCA notice published by GitHub. It is unknown whether the source code used to suggest tweets was leaked.
