Elon Musk’s X, which is now the name for the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, seems to be experiencing issues displaying tweets from before December 2014 that included photos or website links. The problems may have started around the time Twitter officially changed its name to X, but no one is really sure when this bug first appeared.
Many old tweets that had photos or used Twitter’s built-in link shortener called “t.co” are now missing that content. Links to websites like YouTube are just shown as plain text with the t.co URL, but that URL no longer works. Some high profile tweets from famous people are also affected.
One tweet that was restored its picture was Ellen DeGeneres’ famous selfie from the 2014 Oscars that got over 2 million retweets. However, not all older tweets with photos have been fixed yet. Another tweet that still showed its photo was a post by President Barack Obama from 2012 about winning his re-election. But it’s unclear if that one was manually fixed or not.
The date of December 2014 seems related to changes Twitter made back then to preview website content in tweets and make media attachments not count against the character limit. Developer notes show Twitter started including this extra information in tweets beginning that month.
However, neither Elon Musk, X’s CEO Linda Yaccarino, or anyone from X have commented on this issue yet. While some thought it could be Musk deliberately removing old content to save money, the fact photos weren’t fully deleted suggests it’s probably a software bug instead from recent leadership changes and layoffs at the company.
