Twitter has begun labeling some tweets with a warning about material “obtained through hacking”. This new label appears on some Twitter posts that, according to Twitter, are based on hacks and leaked documents, but Twitter users have found an easy way to put together a URL to make it appear on any tweet.
The new label appears on a story of independent outlet The Grayzone this week. Sharing the URL of this particular story will generate the alert. But Twitter also shows the warning if you deceive it by using a specially crafted link to a real URL, combined with the tagged one. It misleads the map-based system of Twitter to accidentally tag tweets with this new alert.
The warning trick works on both the web and Twitter mobile apps for iOS and Android, and it even seems to drop the Android version if you try to like a tweet that contains this new label.
Twitter’s new controversial warning over 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 to be one of the first times we have seen this label as part of Twitter policy on hacked material. Twitter has also used similar labels to combat misleading COVID-19 information and Trump’s myriad of misleading and false tweets.
We reached out to Twitter for comment on when the company will be fixing its new label, and we’ll update you accordingly.