Microsoft’s GitHub has taken down a repository by a user named “FreeSpeechEnthusiast”, the repository contained proprietary source code to Twitter and it was taken down after Twitter filed a DCMA takedown request. The username appears to be a dig at Twitter founder Elon Musk, who has frequently claimed to be a “free speech absolutist.”
The petition was filed by Twitter on Frida in the District Court of Northern California requesting that GitHub take down the code and also help it uncover the perpetrator. The subpoena asks that GitHub disclose the name(s), address(es), email address(es), telephone number(s), IP address(es), and social media profile data, linked with “FreeSpeechEnthusiast”.
The news comes just days before Musk allegedly makes Twitter’s recommendation algorithm open source on March 31.
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It is unclear what portion of Twitter was leaked on GitHub and for how long. The repository containing “Proprietary source code for Twitter’s platform and internal tools” was removed, according to GitHub’s DCMA takedown blog.
The code-hosting site did not specify whether or not users were able to access the repository before the company removed it. We have requested comments and will update the story if we receive one.
Twitter may be concerned about copies of the code that are not on GitHub. According to the New York Times, Twitter’s internal investigation revealed that the people responsible for the leak left the company last year. According to the story, the social network’s executives were only recently made aware of the code leak.
Following Musk’s takeover last year, the company is in trouble. According to recent reports, Tesla CEO Elon Musk now values Twitter at $20 billion, which is less than half of the $44 billion he paid for the social network. According to the New York Times, Musk also sent an email to employees announcing a new stock compensation program in which he stated that Twitter could be worth $250 billion one day.
Musk has taken drastic cost-cutting measures to improve Twitter’s finances, including mass layoffs and the relaunch of a new subscription program that includes verification as one of the benefits. Twitter has only made $11 million from this new service, according to data from analytics firm Sensor Tower. In comparison, Twitter reported $1.17 billion in revenue for the second quarter of 2022.
Musk stated at a recent conference that time spent on users’ Twitter accounts is underutilized.
“The average amount of time that people spend on Twitter per day that 250 million [monthly active users] is around half an hour or so. So what we have is — the thing that’s I think most interesting — is there are about 120 to 130 million hours of human attention per day on Twitter,” he said
“Every single day on, average, which is — I think it comes to a really interesting point which is to — just it’s startling how poorly monetized that is — because you have to say like how valuable is that attention 100 to 130 million hours of human attention per day of people that read — so these are the generally the smartest people in the world, the most influential people in the world.”
