Every day it’s a new thing with ‘X’ under Elon Musk, and not always a good one. On Sunday, users of the social media website woke up to find that most of their pictures and links tweeted before December 2014 were gone. It is now believed that it could be another cost-cutting move by Musk.
Although the possibility of a technical glitch cannot be denied either, as the actual content posted hasn’t been deleted.
“More vandalism from @elonmusk. Twitter has now removed all media posted before 2014. That’s – so far – almost a decade of pictures and videos from the early 2000s removed from the service,” Tom Coates posted on X.
Coates wrote that you could also search your tweets by using the structure “from: {your user name} until:2014-01-01” in X search.
In one of the more famous incidents of the deletion, a photo by television host Ellen DeGeneres taken during the 2014 Academy Awards ceremony with various celebrities like Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence also went missing from her tweet.
The picture was replaced by a dead link.
The photo at the time became the “most retweeted ever” with over 2 million shares on then-Twitter.
Even though a number of websites reported later that the photo in the tweet by DeGeneres had returned, it seems to be visible to a small number of people.
A Community Note posted under the first post by Coates mentioned suggested that it could be a problem with the link shortener t.co.
“Images before/around 2014 are still saved on Twitter/X’s servers, however, the t.co links appear to be broken at the moment,” it said.
It was pointed out that while the DeGeneres selfie is currently missing from her tweet, it was available on their servers
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BhxWutnCEAAtEQ6?format=jpg&name=large
Neither the company nor the owner have made any comments on the issue so far.
However, Musk did make a cryptic post on Sunday saying X may fall.
Recently, he made another controversial decision which is yet to be finalized.
The social media website is going to take away the feature that allows its users to block any other user.