Twitter started labeling some tweets with a warning about materials “obtained through hacking”. This new label is appearing in some news that Twitter believes is based on hacks and leaked documents, but Twitter users have found an easy way to hack a URL together to make it appear in any tweet.
The new label appeared in a story of independent output The Grayzone this week. If you share the URL for that specific story, the strike will be generated. But Twitter also displays the warning if you trick it into using a specially crafted link to a genuine URL combined with the flagged one. This tricks Twitter’s card-based system to accidentally flag tweets with this new warning.
The warning trick works on both the web and Twitter mobile apps for iOS and Android, and even seems to crash the Android version if you try to like a tweet that includes this new label.
The controversial new alert for hacked Twitter 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 established a policy for using these warning labels.
This seems to be one of the first times that we saw this label in action as part of Twitter hacked material policy. Twitter also used similar labels to combat misleading information from COVID-19 and Trump’s myriad of misleading and fake tweets.
We contacted Twitter to comment when the company is going to fix its new label and we will update it accordingly.