Twitter Axes All Images & Links Posted From 2011–2014
Twitter (now X) has recently pulled a vanishing act that’s turning heads. It seems that the social media giant has waved its wand and made countless images and links from 2011 to 2014 disappear into the digital abyss.
Twitter user Tom Coates was the first to notice the absent information on Saturday. Along with the pictures, links created during that period via Twitter’s link shorter have also “disappeared.” That means that the media is still somewhere on the platform’s servers, but for now, it’s not accessible to users on the site.
More vandalism from @elonmusk. Twitter has now removed all media posted before 2014. Thats - so far - almost a decade of pictures and videos from the early 2000s removed from the service.
— Tom Coates (@tomcoates) August 19, 2023
For example, here’s a search of my media tweets from before 2014. https://t.co/FU6K34oqmA
Curiously, if you’re searching for pictures and links from 2016 onwards, they’re still here. This is probably because Twitter didn’t support native photo uploads until 2011. In those early days, image-hosting services like TwitPic came to the rescue. However, they, too, met their digital demise in 2014, ushering a plethora of content into the abyss.
In 2016, though, Twitter underwent a makeover in dealing with pictures and links. It introduced “enhanced URL enrichment,” which made links more visually appealing with previews. It also brought in “native attachments,” a fancy term that meant you could add photos without gobbling up your precious 140-character limit.
So, what’s the cause of this? It’s believed to be posts that utilize Twitter’s link-shortening domain, the URL used to track user activity, could be causing the images to no longer display.
The big question remains: Is this a calculated move or just a glitch in the Twitterverse? The discovery comes right after Elon Musk announced that the “block” feature is on its way out of the platform.
On the one hand, Redditors on the DataHoarder forum posit that Twitter developers might have accidentally broken something in an attempt to transfer the site to X.com. Forbes also highlights another theory floating around that the platform could be axing pictures to save on image hosting fees.
[via PC Mag and Forbes, ID 285102025© Olena Churilova | Dreamstime.com]
