Disappearance of old tweets: links and images problems at X (formerly Twitter)

A number of links and images from tweets posted before December 2014 have been lost on the short message service X (formerly Twitter). Initial fears that the images were completely deleted do not appear to be correct. Apparently changes related to the link shortener caused the problems. It is unclear if and when the problem will be fixed.

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Among the large number of messages affected was one of the most shared posts on the network, by US actress Ellen DeGeneres in 2014 posted during an Oscars. In the well-known selfie, she can be seen with Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence and other celebrities. In the meantime, however, this image is being displayed again, which is not the case for a large number of other tweets. Images of the Ukrainian Maidan revolution in 2013 and 2014 are also affected, for example. X/Twitter is also often used by historians as a source because of its immediacy to the events.

Posts on X/Twitter that were published before the end of 2014 currently have broken links and images

No response from X/Twitter

X user Tom Coates is among those who were the first to point out the problem over the weekend. X owner Elon Musk and the company have not yet commented on this. X does not have a press office to which questions can be directed.

Links generated with X/Twitter’s URL shortener (t.co) appear as plain text in the affected posts and are unclickable. It now seems likely that the problem is related to technical changes in 2016. With the changes, links in tweets no longer counted against the then 140-character limit and instead data was stored as metadata in tweets. This metadata has been created since the end of 2014 – the non-existence of the data for older tweets could therefore be the cause.

(mki)

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