Elon Musk's Twitter is taking legal action after parts of its source code that underpin the website were leaked online.

The social media platform’s billionaire owner Elon Musk wants to identify the people behind the account which published the information on Github, a Microsoft-owned platform for sharing code for software development.

Twitter has asked the US District Court for the Northern District of California to order Github to produce "all identifying information" associated with the user named 'FreeSpeechEnthusiast'.

Court documents say "various excerpts" of Twitter's source code, which is used to run the company online, were posted.
Github said it took down the code on Friday at Twitter's request.

Source code is the fundamental component of a computer program that is created by a programmer, outlining functions, descriptions, methods other operational statements.

It is designed to be human-readable and formatted in a way that developers and other users can understand.

Exposing Twitter’s internal workings may make the service more vulnerable to hacking attempts.

The social network is asking GitHub for the names, addresses, telephone numbers, emails, social media profiles and IP addresses of the parties involved in the leak.

The company has also launched an internal investigation into the leak, according to the New York Times.

The username chosen by the leaker appears designed to poke fun at Mr Musk, who insisted his $44bn takeover last year was about restoring free speech to the platform.

Earlier this month, the billionaire tweeted that he wanted to make part of the source code - the part relating to recommended tweets - public.

He said: “Twitter will open source all code used to recommend tweets on March 31st.

“Our 'algorithm' is overly complex & not fully understood internally. People will discover many silly things , but we'll patch issues as soon as they're found!

“We're developing a simplified approach to serve more compelling tweets, but it's still a work in progress. That'll also be open source.

“Providing code transparency will be incredibly embarrassing at first, but it should lead to rapid improvement in recommendation quality. Most importantly, we hope to earn your trust.”

Twitter did not respond to requests for comment.