RIP Twitter Circles

Pour one out for Twitter Circles, another casualty of whatever the hell Elon Muck is trying to do here.

X, the app formerly known as Twitter, has shut down the Circles feature, which allowed users to post to a small, exclusive audience. Like an Instagram Close Friends story, Circles — née Twitter Circles — offered a more intimate social media experience. In other words, you could overshare about your life to an audience of friends only, rather than the whole internet. And isn’t one of the greatest joys of the internet to emotionally shitpost without worrying about the consequences?

But, as the whims of the Circle reminded us, nothing we say on the internet is ever actually free from consequence. The feature worked almost all of the time. Almost. And anything less than 100% efficacy is not ideal for a feature that people used to share private thoughts with trusted friends.

Not that it always worked, mind you.

As early as February, some users reported that their Circle tweets were reaching a wider audience than they were supposed to. These glitches showed up again in April, and X (then known as Twitter) apologized for the error in May, marking a rare moment of transparency for the company.

Even when Circle tweets were truly private, they often appeared not to be — the green banner denoting it as a Circle post only appeared some of the time (I had received some paranoid texts from friends who wondered if I knew I had posted about [redacted] on main, but nope, this was just the glitchy old bird app playing tricks on us).

Adios, Circles.