Twitter Has Warning Labels For Tweets With Materials 'Obtained Through Hacking'

Information that is secret and not meant for the public, but made public, can be interesting.

After all, information that is meant for no one who is unauthorized, has reasons for its secrecy. When leaked, this can appeal many people due to that fact. But the thing is, publishing data that has been exfiltrated and obtained through hacking, is something that Twitter dislikes. This is why it has labels for that.

The microblogging site believes that stories that are based on hacks and leaked documents can be misleading and cause unrest.

"The use of hacks and hacking to exfiltrate information from private computer systems can be used to manipulate the public conversation, and makes all of us less secure online. We do not condone attempts to compromise or infiltrate computer systems. As such, we don’t permit the use of our services to directly distribute content obtained through hacking by the people or groups associated with a hack," Twitter said in a dedicated Help page.

And for that, the social media "may label Tweets containing or linking to hacked materials to help people understand the authenticity or source of these materials and provide additional context."

The label reads: These materials may have been obtained through hacking.

The label first appeared on a story from an independent outlet The Grayzone:

According to Twitter, it defined a hack as "an intrusion or access of a computer, network, or electronic device that was unauthorized or exceeded authorized access."

And the label here is meant to show on posts that include:

1. Unauthorized access or interception, or access that exceeds authorization (for example, from an insider), to a computer, network or electronic device, including breaches or intrusions.
2. Disclosing materials accessed legitimately outside of approved systems or networks.
3. Disclosing materials where there is evidence that they were obtained through malware or social engineering.

"We define hacked materials as the information obtained through a hack. Information need not be personally-identifiable private information in order to qualify as hacked materials under this policy," added Twitter.

Twitter shows the warning label to the distribution of materials that includes:

1. Posting hacked content in the form of a text or other media.
2. Posting tweets which include links to hacked content hosted on other websites.

Soon and ironically, this feature itself has been hacked by some Twitter users.

As shown by Tom Warren from The Verge, Twitter can be tricked into showing this warning label to any tweet, using a specially crafted link to a genuine URL that is combined with the flagged one.

This apparently confused the algorithm Twitter uses in its card-based system, and made it to show the warning label.

The trick works on both web and Twitter’s mobile apps for iOS and Android.

It should be noted that the warning label comes a few months after Twitter was criticized for blocking links to New York Post stories about Hunter Biden, the son of U.S. President Joe Biden

In the October 2020 post by the news agency, the material for the story had been taken from Hunter Biden's laptop.

Because of the backlash, Twitter reversed the decision to block links, and use the warning labels instead.

Twitter does makes an exception for this policy.

"We recognize that source materials obtained through leaks can serve as the basis for important reporting by news agencies meant to hold our institutions and leaders to account. As such, we defer to their editorial judgement in publishing these materials, and believe our responsibility is to provide additional context that is useful in providing clarity to the conversation that happens on Twitter."