Twitter is one of the leading social media platforms out there in the market with around 330 million monthly active users and around 145 million daily active users. The platform is now enabling its users to experiment with posting disappearing content. Fleet, the feature that enables the mobile users to post short stories (i.e. photos, videos) along with texts, that automatically disappear after 24 hours. Although due to a bug it has been reported that in some cases Fleets aren’t disappearing and can still be accessed after 24 hours have expired. Details of this bug were released in a series of tweets, within a week after the feature was launched.
A Twitter spokesperson said, ” 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.”
The bug permits anyone to view and download a user’s fleets without giving a notification that the user’s fleet has been seen and by whom. The implication with this bug is that it can be manipulated to archive a user’s fleets after they have expired. Each fleet has its direct URL, which when opened in a browser would load the fleet as an image or a video. But even after the 24 hours end, the server still returns links to fleets that have already disappeared from view in the Twitter app.
Twitter has admitted that the fix implies that fleets should disappear suitably, it also said that it won’t eliminate the fleet from its servers for up to 30 days — and it may even hold onto these fleets for an extended period if they disobey its rules. They have recognized that fleets can still be loaded from their direct URLs even after they expire.
