X is shutting down Circles

X is shutting down Circles

Illustration: The Verge

X is planning to shut down Circles, a feature that lets you share posts with a limited group of people instead of all of your followers. The company said in a “PSA” on Thursday that Circles will be disabled by October 31st.

“After this date, you will not be able to create new posts that are limited to your Circle, nor will you be able to add people to your Circle,” X wrote in a post on its help center. “You will, however, be able to remove people from your Circle,” and the company gave instructions on how to do that.

Twitter (not X) officially launched Circles (which it called “Circle”) in August 2022; Elon Musk wasn’t yet the official owner of the company. (At that time, he was trying to get out of his deal to buy it.) But in April, some posts intended for Circles starting appearing on the platform’s For You timeline, which obviously wasn’t ideal if you wanted a post to only be seen by your handpicked Circle audience.

Confirmed someone I'm not even following was able to see a private Twitter Circle tweet (thank you @TheSahilDev)

This hurts trust in the platform a lot. Should be top priority @TwitterEng pic.twitter.com/BCYPkikJ2p

— Theo - t3.gg (@t3dotgg) April 8, 2023

X didn’t give a reason as to why it’s shutting down the feature. But the company has recently been making more of a push around its Facebook Groups-like Communities feature — perhaps it viewed Circles and Communities as too similar to keep both around.