As Free Speech Enthusiast Elon Plans To Release Twitter’s Source Code, Twitter Desperately Seeking Identity Of FreeSpeechEnthusiast Who Leaked Twitter Source Code

Ever since Elon Musk made his initial bid to buy Twitter, he’s talked about “open sourcing” the algorithm. He mentioned it last April in the first interview he gave, on the TED stage, to talk about his plans with Twitter. And since taking over the company at the end of October, he’s mentioned it over and over again.

Indeed, on February 21st, he promised that Twitter would release its “algorithm” as open source code “next week.”

And then, two weeks ago, he announced that “all code used to recommend tweets” will be released as open source on March 31st (i.e., this Friday).

Who knows if he’ll meet his deadline this time (he has a habit of missing deadlines pretty regularly).

However, over the weekend something vaguely interesting happened, in that it was revealed that someone had already, um, “open sourced” Twitter’s source code for it, by posting a repository of at least some of the code to Github. This was revealed in a DMCA notice that Twitter sent to Github, followed by a DMCA subpoena demanding the identity of the person who posted it along with any one who downloaded it.

Now, I initially wasn’t going to write about this. Leaks happen, and I think it’s perfectly fine for Twitter to issue the DMCA takedown for such a leak. But what caught my attention was the username of the leaker. According to the DMCA notice, the leaker went by “FreeSpeechEnthusiast,” and their account is (at the moment) still up on GitHub showing a single contribution on January 3rd (which makes me wonder if the code was sitting there for anyone to find for a whole month and a half):

That name choice takes this from a garden variety leak operation to an ultimate troll attempt against admitted troll Elon Musk. After all, Musk himself continually (if ridiculously) refers to himself as a “free speech absolutist.”

So, given both Elon’s repeated promises to reveal the source code and his publicly stated (if often violated) commitment to “free speech,” the leak of the source code by someone using the name FreeSpeechEnthusiast seems like it was designed directly as a troll move to Musk, goading him into exposing his own hypocrisy (which is way easier than many people may have thought).

Well played, FreeSpeechEnthusiast, well played.

As for the actual leak, again, it’s not clear how much source code was actually leaked or how problematic it is. As I understand it (and would expect) the full source code for Twitter is cumbersome and complex. Releasing a full dump of it would be difficult even if authorized, so I’m guessing it’s not everything.

And while you can find lots of quotes from “cybersecurity experts” about how this may expose vulnerabilities, my guess is that the risk of that is actually fairly low at first? Given enough time, yes, someone can probably find some messy code and some vulnerabilities, but Twitter had (at one time) lots of engineers who were focused on finding and patching those vulnerabilities themselves, and so whatever remains is likely nothing obvious, and anyone going through the code now would first have to figure out how it all worked, which may be no easy task in the first place.

Indeed, this is why, from the beginning, I’ve said that Elon’s promises to open source the code was mostly meaningless, because there are almost no examples of companies taking large, complex systems in proprietary code, and open sourcing them and finding anything valuable come out of it, because there’s so much baggage and complexity for people to even figuring out what the hell anything really does.

This is also why Musk’s announced plans to fix things that people find in the code he still promises to release this week also seems a bit silly, as there’s a reasonable interpretation of this as: “we fired everyone who understands our code, so we’re going to open it up to get engineers to clean up our code for free for the world’s richest man.”

It’s also why the better approach would have just been to improve the API and to allow more developers to build more tools, services, and features on top of Twitter code, but Elon’s already killed off that whole idea.

In the end, this particular story isn’t likely to be that big a deal, but it seemed worth commenting on solely for the lulz of the epic trolling job whoever leaked the code did in highlighting Musk’s hypocrisy. Again.