The Twitter Fleets are visible even after "officially" vanished

The Twitter Fleets are visible even after officially vanished

A bug allows you to reach them in the platform's backend and save them without warning the user. Twitter is hard at work to fix the leak

Fleets (Photo: Twitter) Twitter Stories can last longer than expected. Due to a bug, the Fleets launched by the social network are visible beyond the scheduled 24 hours. Basically, a flaw in the system made it possible to trace the timed contents, kept by the platform for 30 days to check that they do not violate its rules, and download them without any notice to their creator.

To report the first situation was Tech Crunch. The risk is in this way the Fleets can be archived, without the author's knowledge, and republished at will, instead of disappearing from the network after 24 hours, like the fateful Instagram Stories that Twitter was inspired by. >
The launch of the feature on a global scale did not go as planned. First Twitter experienced a Fleet boom that took a toll on servers. Then the bug.

full disclosure: scraping fleets from public accounts without triggering the read notification

the endpoint is: https://t.co/332FH7TEmN

- cathode gay tube (@donk_enby) November 20, 2020



As reported by a Twitter user in a thread, the flaw allows anyone to access and download a user's Fleets without them received a notification.

This is possible thanks to an application designed to interact with Twitter's backend systems thanks to its Api for developers. By doing so, accessing the direct URL of the individual Fleet was child's play, thus reaching the contents even 24 hours after their publication. Twitter keeps Fleets for 30 days after they expire as they may be needed for verification if they violate the rules. The bug would therefore allow to reach the Fleets that have been moved to this "limbo" pending the definitive elimination.

"We are aware of a bug accessible through a technical solution in which some Fleet multimedia urls could be accessible after 24 hours, ”a Twitter spokesperson said in a press release:“ We are working on a solution that should be implemented soon. ”