Twitter “Circles” is broken and gay exhibitionists are freaking out

When Twitter unveiled its private “Circles” feature last August, many gays marked the occasion by flooding the website with nudes. But eight months later, online exhibitionists are facing a scary reality: all of their x-rated pics aren’t private after all.

Eek!

A few tech sites are covering the troubling development, which seems to be stem from “Circle” posts showing up in the annoying “For You” tab. (Remember when you weren’t bombarded with tweets from people you don’t follow? Those were the days!)

From TechCrunch: “Most often, it seems that Circle tweets are being surfaced in the For You timeline to users who follow the poster, but are not in their Circle. Others have reported that their Circle tweets are reaching even further than those who follow them.”

That’s frightening, never mind a huge breach of trust. Twitter “Circles” are supposed to be akin to the “Close Friends” feature on Instagram and the “Private Story” option on Snapchat. People post things there that aren’t meant for the world to see.

Like nudes. Did we mention that gays post a lot of nudes?

Twitter has been akin to a dumpster fire since Elon Musk moved in with his kitchen sink, with the “Circles” bug serving as just the latest calamity. Over the weekend, Twitter suppressed tweets with Substack links, because the platform launched a new feature that Musk thought was too similar to Twitter.

Like most of his horrible ideas, the issue has been rectified. We’re still waiting on everyone to lose their blue checkmarks…

But it doesn’t seem like “Circle” users are quite so lucky–at least not yet. And the gays are understandably upset.

While people of all sexual stripes share nudes, the practice is seemingly sacrosanct among gays. We’re typically more open about our sexual desires. And sex-positivity is healthy!

It’s also a part of our cultural history.

Long before the age of hookup apps, two gay men started a directory service called The Vagabond Club, which included listings of gay-friendly establishments throughout the country. In time, they launched a pen-pal service, along with film that could be used to develop pictures (developing nudes at the local photo lab wasn’t recommended in the mid-20th century).

In other words, we were sending naked portraits to each other decades before cell phones. And that’s what makes us trendsetters!

That also applies to turning Twitter into an amateur porn haven. At the start of the pandemic, queer men started proliferating Twitter with “alts,” anonymous accounts in which identities are hidden and nudity is not. The “main” is for public consumption, but the “alt” is not.

Unlike Lil Nas X, few have a desire to “post hole on main.”

That is, until Twitter “Circles” came along. Now people could have the thrill of posting hole on main, without actually doing it. Look at how excited everybody was!

And this is why we can’t have nice things. Musk can use Twitter as his personal playground all he wants, but now his buffoonery is negatively impacting the gays in the worst possible way. This is a fight that even the richest man in the world can’t win.