Twitter admits to ‘security incident’ involving Circles tweets

For weeks users had been reporting Circles tweets receiving likes and views from accounts that should not have been able to see them. Photograph: Jeff Chiu/AP

A privacy breach at Twitter published tweets that were never supposed to be seen by anyone but the poster’s closest friends to the site at large, the company has admitted after weeks of stonewalling reports.

The site’s Circles feature allows users to set an exclusive list of friends and post tweets that only they can read. Similar to Instagram’s Close Friends setting, it allows users to share private thoughts, explicit images or unprofessional statements without risking sharing them with their wider network.