Twitter (X) Hit by Data Leak of 2.8B Users – Allegedly an Insider Job
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Re: Twitter (X) Hit by Data Leak of 2.8B Users – Allegedly an Insider Job
#2Tl;dr:
- probably all the data isn't from X
- the data seems to be all public - e.g.
- user ID and screen name
- number of followers
- number of tweets
- source of last Tweet (e.g. TweetDeck)
- location and timezone
- profile is protected or verified
Re: Twitter (X) Hit by Data Leak of 2.8B Users – Allegedly an Insider Job
#3Oh No, what will a bot do ? Maybe we can find out what percentage of these users are either bots or an ID for use by AI.
I wonder if the public is fully insensitive to these leaks now that we seem to have a big leak every other day.
Re: Twitter (X) Hit by Data Leak of 2.8B Users – Allegedly an Insider Job
#4Place bet: Musk investigates while shutting down any data protection agencies.
Re: Twitter (X) Hit by Data Leak of 2.8B Users – Allegedly an Insider Job
#5Article itself says
>Their theory that a disgruntled employee leaked the data during the layoffs remains unconfirmed, and there’s no concrete evidence to support it; it is only a plausible hypothesis given the timing and internal mess at X.
Re: Twitter (X) Hit by Data Leak of 2.8B Users – Allegedly an Insider Job
#6Tl;dr: - probably all the data isn't from X - the data seems to be all public - e.g. - user ID and screen name - number of followers - number of tweets - source of last Tweet (e.g. TweetDeck) - location and timezone - profile is protected or verified I'm not sure that headline is very sensible to propagate.
The posting client was removed from the UI and has not been public for a while
Re: Twitter (X) Hit by Data Leak of 2.8B Users – Allegedly an Insider Job
#7This is just information that was publicly visible previously. Someone could see almost all of this on old archive.org pages. The current UI hides some of it but it’s not like this is secret.
Re: Twitter (X) Hit by Data Leak of 2.8B Users – Allegedly an Insider Job
#8Or you could use Bluesky where all the public data can be replicated, by design. Someone is working on showing how a live replica can be implemented on a Raspberry Pi. [1]
(The scale is much smaller than Twitter, though.)
Since it's public anyway, it's hard to say if being able to copy all the data is good or bad. There are tradeoffs.
We allow it for a public git repo. Is social media different? [2].
[1] https://bsky.app/profile/why.bsky.team/post/3lkwg2djrfk23
[2] The tree ring model of culture and politics - https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/03/29/treering.html
Re: Twitter (X) Hit by Data Leak of 2.8B Users – Allegedly an Insider Job
#9[flagged]
Re: Twitter (X) Hit by Data Leak of 2.8B Users – Allegedly an Insider Job
#10Clickbait. Leak has irrelevant and useless data. Why anyone would bother to "steal" this data I have no clue. Almost all of it could be collected if you scraped the site over time.