Twitter (X) Hit by Data Leak of 2.8B Users – Allegedly an Insider Job

(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

>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.

If this leak proves that more than 80% of Twitter accounts are bots, it should cause some damage

- 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 wonder if the public is fully insensitive to these leaks now that we seem to have a big leak every other day.