Twitter’s experiment in letting two folks tweet collectively has a bizarre loophole. It’s now potential to accidentally make an unlisted tweet. It’s not non-public, however you possibly can solely see it if somebody sends you a hyperlink. Or embeds it in a web site.
This is an unlisted tweet.
Try to seek out it in my timeline.
Try to seek for it.— Sean Hollister (@StarFire2258) July 14, 2022
These tweets don’t seem in your timeline, and they don’t seem should you seek for them — and but, they exist. People may even reply to them. And, in the event that they do, these replies will seem in a Twitter search, and folks can discover the unique tweet in a roundabout means.
Here’s the trick, assuming you’ve entry to CoTweets. You have to ask one other Twitter account to CoTweet a tweet with you — and they should ignore that request. (Which isn’t exhausting in the event that they’re utilizing Twitter on a desktop shopper, the place the settle for / decline buttons don’t but exist.)
If they settle for the CoTweet, your tweet goes totally public. If they refuse, it will get deleted. But so long as it stays in limbo, it’s dwell for anybody with the URL to see. My colleague Jay Peters and I did a bunch of testing this morning.
I extremely doubt that is Twitter’s intent, and it in all probability gained’t final for lengthy this manner. Perhaps Twitter will robotically delete pending CoTweets after a sure period of time. I requested and I’ll let you realize what I hear.
Or, possibly it’ll stick round as a result of that is truly one thing that Twitter advertisers have had entry to for some time: one other model of that is known as a “Promoted-only” tweet and is taken into account a function of the platform. Andy Baio wrote about it in 2015, and his “ad” is still live. You can in all probability try that way of making an unlisted tweet, too, since Twitter doesn’t make an enormous distinction between customers and advertisers anyhow.
Nobody will see this tweet aside from @anildash. It’s not in my timeline, search, or viewable by any followers. TWITTER MYSTERIES ✨
— Andy Baio (@waxpancake) February 3, 2015
A pair limitations: I couldn’t set my unlisted tweets to disallow replies, and replying to my personal unlisted tweet pulled it proper out of the ether into my public timeline once more.
I don’t have any nice concepts as to why you’d need to do all of this past bragging rights — however that’s how I really feel concerning the CoTweet function, interval! Bad actors ought to know this type of tweet is seen to Twitter and its information companions, although. (If that’s you, please cease and go do one thing productive for our crumbling society as a substitute.)
