A bug is causing some users’ fleets on Twitter to remain accessible even after the 24 hour expiration date.
The new fleets feature is meant to allow users to post ephemeral tweets that are supposed to automatically disappear after 24 hours.
However, a bug is letting people view and download fleets without notifying the user even after 24 hours. The social media giant has acknowledged the problem.
“We’re aware of a bug accessible through a technical workaround where some Fleets media URLs may be accessible after 24 hours. We are working on a fix that should be rolled out shortly,” a Twitter spokesperson told The Verge.
The workaround appears to be a developer app that can scrape fleets from public accounts through Twitter’s API. Twitter notes that the fix means that fleets should now expire properly, and that even if someone has a URL for an active fleet, it won’t be visible past the expiration point.
News of this bug comes as Twitter has slowed down the roll out of fleets to fix performance issues. Once the feature launched, some users said the feature was lagging and freezing for them, while others said it was crashing their apps.
Further, some users have questioned whether Twitter has placed enough safeguards within the feature to prevent fleets from being used for harassment.
These concerns were raised once it was discovered that users don’t get notifications when someone tags them in a fleet, which means that someone can direct harassment towards another user without them knowing.
Via: The Verge
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