Twitter has begun to label some tweets with a warning about material ‘obtained through hacking’. This new label appears on a number of news stories that Twitter believes are based on hacks and leaked documents, but Twitter users have found an easy way to hack a URL together so that it appears on every tweet.
The new label appeared on a story from independent outlet The Grayzone this week. If you share the URL of this particular story, the alert will be generated. But Twitter will also display the warning if you trick it by using a specially crafted link to a real URL in conjunction with the highlighted URL. This misleads Twitter’s card-based system to accidentally flag tweets with this new warning.
The warning trick works on both the web and Twitter’s mobile apps for iOS and Android, and it even looks like the Android version will crash if you like a tweet containing this new label.
Twitter’s new controversial warning about hacked material comes after the company was criticized for blocking links to New York Post stories about Joe Biden’s son. Twitter quickly reversed its decision to block links and introduced a policy to use these warning labels instead.
This seems like one of the first times we’ve seen this label in action as part of Twitter’s Hacked Materials PolicyTwitter has also used similar labels to combat misleading COVID-19 information and Trump’s myriad of misleading and false tweets.
We’ve reached out to Twitter for comment on when the company will fix its new label, and we’ll update you accordingly.