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Twitter Bug Lets Fleets Be Viewed and Downloaded Long After Expiration

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Twitter's new ephemeral tweets, or "fleets," have been hit by a bug that allows them to be accessed long after their supposed 24-hour expiration time, less than a week after the feature launched.

twitterfleets.jpg

Fleets are short stories made up of photos or videos with overlaying text. Much like stories on Instagram or Facebook, fleets are located at the top of the Twitter timeline.

According to Techcrunch, the bug allowed fleets to be viewed and downloaded by other users without notifying their creator. Details of the bug were posted in a series of tweets over the weekend. Twitter soon acknowledged the issue and says a fix is on the way.
“We're aware of a bug accessible through a technical workaround where some Fleets media URLs may be accessible after 24 hours," a Twitter spokesperson told TechCrunch. "We are working on a fix that should be rolled out shortly."
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The workaround refers to a developer app that could reportedly scrape fleets from public accounts through Twitter's API. However, once Twitter's fix is applied, URLs for fleets won't work whether they're active or expired.

Twitter says it doesn't delete fleets from its servers for up to 30 days, and it may retain fleets for longer if they violate its rules.

Article Link: Twitter Bug Lets Fleets Be Viewed and Downloaded Long After Expiration
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/23/twitter-bug-fleets-viewed-after-expiration/
The way that Twitter sorts messages (not chronologically at all) is awkward and makes the platform mostly useless. It is almost impossible to find the required information. Frustrating!
 
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Today I learned about the existence of “fleets”. Also that they are accesible for 24hrs (and not 8hrs, 16hrs or 33h54m) except for Twitter inc itself, who has access to it up to 30days later or conveniently more if it is deemed so (effectively accesible to the them however long they want).

On a serious note: As an user browsing by, is it clear if what I’m reading is a tweet or a fleet?
More often than not twitter’s usage rubs me off the wrong way, the often passive aggressive line of commenting threads... a lot of the time it has good things but the few bad apples happen often enough that no amount of blocking and muting will ever clear it. I wonder how these fleets will play a part in all of this, I smell a lot more of screen captures are going to be happening.
 
polyphenol said:
Does anyone actually intend using this feature?

I am not a Twitter user - just have a look when others post about tweets. But I am trying to get my head around why people would use them? When there are so many ways of recording them - such as a simple screenshot.
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I can see 1 use for it. When a someone (techchannel or youtube/twitcher) is going to stream he can put out a message that says "streaming soon X". That that message goes away or stay forever nobody cares about besides the people who read it right before he went live.
 
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The Chosen One said:
I can see 1 use for it. When a someone (techchannel or youtube/twitcher) is going to stream he can put out a message that says "streaming soon X". That that message goes away or stay forever nobody cares about besides the people who read it right before he went live.
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It is not how I would have chosen to tackle that case.

Possibly a countdown timer tweet?

Display what is scheduled, when it is scheduled, and how long from now to the scheduled time. Maybe counting down in days, then hours, then minutes, then seconds - like eBay auctions. A graphic that becomes brighter, bigger, bolder as the time gets near, then switches to B&W to indicate it is in the past. Leave it there so people can see what was promised and when.
 
polyphenol said:
Does anyone actually intend using this feature?

I am not a Twitter user - just have a look when others post about tweets. But I am trying to get my head around why people would use them? When there are so many ways of recording them - such as a simple screenshot.
Click to expand...
I don't see any sense about it beyond other social media like Instagram or Snapchat, but here, Spain, even one sports newspaper has just put up "Stories" on the home page of the newspaper, nothing surprises me now, waiting for a toilet with "Stories" or something like that.
 
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It seems this feature is exclusive to the Twitter app right now; I only use Tweetbot and the web site, so I've thankfully been spared this nonsense.
 
Baumi said:
Technically, that is a bug, though, isn't it? It may not be a programming mistake or hardware error but it's still a mistake in the design of the feature that led to it not behaving as advertised.
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Well, I wouldn't say any kind of design weakness is a bug.
 
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